Terrible work, everyone.
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
320 points (100.0% liked)
news
23550 readers
896 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Could the old climate be restored over several generations using some large scare application of some future technology? After a rapid transition away from the carbon energy economy. I guess there is a lot of speculative coping in this question.
It'll fix itself over the next few tens of thousands of years, but obviously that doesn't help us at all.
From what I understand there isn't a model that suggests the earth becoming un-inhabitable by complex life no matter how bad we fuck up right now.
The sharks will be fine. They're older than Polaris. They got this shit.
Well, that's at least comforting. Any Venus model would probably push quite a few people into an existential crisis. Thank you for your response.
I used to very much share that fear until someone sat me down and explained that even in the absolute worst case scenarios we're not going to get a hothouse earth situation. Still plenty to worry about, but multi-cellular life will probably survive no matter what we do.
great, but I'm still worried about my life
I'm right their with you. I find the "eh, the earth will be fine" response many people have when i bring up global warming bizarre and upsetting. I am heartened that even if we're not able to mitigate this, there will still be life and with life, hope. A lot of what we do as leftists is trying to create good conditions for people who will come after us and never know our names. But I want to save this world. I want to stop the sixth great extinction. I want to try to save the amazon and the pacific northwest and many other places of beauty and splendor.
It is good that the world will survive, but the world that survives will be all the better if we struggle and mitigate the damage now.
Yeah. I kinda freaked out over the summer reading the posts. We just gotta live life and hope whoever comes after us learns from our mistakes. Maybe someone will build something from the rubble like Matt said.
In some ways yes, but in other ways we'll just have to find a new equilibrium. The extent to which this is fixable really depends on how many "tipping points" we've passed over. Lots of systems in the global climate are (at least) bistable, meaning they have at least two dynamical regimes that they can settle into--think two bowls separated by a high wall, with a ball rolling around in one of them. Since different stable states exist, if we push the relevant systems far enough, they'll "snap" into a qualitatively different state, and then won't return to their original state even if the forcings all return to pre-industrial levels. There are a number of big ones that we should be concerned about, but the global thermohaline circulation that drives ocean currents is probably the most obvious and urgent one. With enough of a disruption, the gradients of temperature and salinity (and thus changes in density) that keep the water stably circulating in the oceans can and will either disappear or change enough that most significant currents cease. It's hard to overstate how catastrophic that would be, and if it were to happen no amount of negative emissions would restart it in the short term.
For other systems, rapidly reducing the GHG content of the atmosphere would (almost) certainly work. That's part of why liberals are so gung-ho about carbon capture and sequestration technology research: it would let us rewind things without having to change much about our global economic system in the immediate term. So far, this is as sci-fi as saying "time travel would help." Capturing a trace gas (remember that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are on the order of 400 parts per million) is thermodynamically challenging, and we don't have anything like the technology to do this at scale for a reasonable cost of energy yet.
So the liberals are selling us a panacea that does not even exist to solve problems that should have been addressed a long time ago. Idk, I feel exhausted saying that. I need to start learning a lot more on this topic myself.
Thank you for your informed responses. I appreciate you helping all of us here understand this grave issue which is criminally neglected by the capitalist powers that be.