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The sad part is, no matter how bad things will get, the same people will keep denying climate change. Even as their shoes melt into the pavement.

Looking at the past, I don't have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we've had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.

Beautiful and sad. Reminds me of u/poemforyoursprog

Just to add to this, Climate Change itself is a lot more than mere Global Warming - since weather is mathematically a Chaotic System, the extra energy retained in the system due to greenhouse gases not only increases the average temperature but also makes extreme weather (not just of the high temperature kind) more likely to happen, hence things like for example many and strong storms in a short-time frame which were the kind of combination that used to happen every couple of decades now happenning every couple of years.

Hence why over the last decade we've seen extreme weather events a lot more and more often.

The high temperature related records broken now (due to the combination with El Niño) are but a subset of the weather record-breaking that's been happenning in the last couple of years.

“Gradually, then suddenly.”

Well tentative take I saw from a climate scientist (in the news I think) was that it might be a flickering of a tipping point. The idea being that complex systems can temporarily look like a new state that they're close to tipping into but not quite there yet. If true, it would mean that we're closer to some tipping point than we thought or would like and this is a kind of prelude.

Yep. Nothing changes because the people that have the power to make the changes don't want to. The system as it is right now works for them. So why the hell would they want to change that? And most of them won't be around to see the devastation so there is another level of apathy to all of it.

We can't get out from underneath this monster it's too late for that. But I hope that we can start putting people into power that are genuinely concerned about this climate crisis and start the true (massive) step to moving us off the path to total uninhabitability

Politicians and billionaires:

There is a scene in the TV show Newsroom (with Jeff Daniels) where he (the news show anchor) is interviewing a climate scientist about the climate change situation. Everything the scientist says eludes to the fact that we are completely screwed. That everything we are trying would have been great things to start doing 20+ years ago. At this point we have already passed the point of recovery.

It was aired in like 2015, and I think of it every time someone talks about this, and what a surprise this whole thing is.

We probably are but it's also very important to remember that were not past the point of no survival. The trend for oil propaganda has been to go from "climate change is fake" to "it's real but it's too late to do anything". It's too late to go back, but it's not too late to act. Don't forget that.

there are many "points of no return". the first irrevocable damage was done when we started burning coal hundreds of years ago, and every year we pass new points after which the earth will be forever changed. that doesn't mean all life is screwed, or humanity will die out. it does mean that things are going to get a lot worse, and the degree to which they're going to get worse is increasing every day we don't address the issue.

the one thing climate scientists DO NOT want you to think is that we are doomed and that it is hopeless. things are bad, and getting worse, but the actions we take DO MATTER.

~~burn down an oil refinery (in minecraft)~~

While I certainly don't want to defend the kind of asshats that insist on doing something as stupid and obnoxious as "rolling coal" I do need to point out that large swaths of the US are currently not setup in such a way that you can realistically get around without a vehicle of some kind. Massive work on public transit plus a fundamental urban planning design change needs to take place before walking, biking, or public transit is a viable way to get from point A to point B.

So until those changes are made, yes most Americans will need a electric or ICE vehicle. It doesn't need to be an inefficient pollution spewing behemoth, but it does need to be something. Really though aside from people intentionally modifying their vehicles to be less efficient and more polluting modern cars are pretty efficient and clean.

The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn't even cars though, it's ships by a landslide. It isn't even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the "Lord of the Flies" island; we've ignored the scientists and now the whole place is burning down.