Our extinction is coming, and the only tragedy is all the other life we'll take with us.
We're just not that great, and our behaviour is "primate basic" to the extreme.
Children playing with matches.
We are violently tribal. We are biased to short term reward over long term gain. Crack those two and you're well on the road to panacea.
If we don't overcome them, we don't adapt, we don't survive. The universe is pretty big - something out there will hopefully make it through the great filter, if not us.
Sure, from a selfish and anthropocentric point of view I want us to survive and prosper, but the reality is that we may not. We're not infinite and indefatigable.
Right now, we are on the path to certain doom. This can change, but whether it will in time is down to getting pretty much all humans everywhere to pull together.
Yes... they somehow impose carbon taxes, go to climate summits and make up protocols to agree to but none of them believe in climate change.
The US wouldn't even ratify Kyoto.
Seems like a good description of the state of the world right now.
As for bickering and blaming others, sure it is annoying but somehow it has led humanity to an era where life is vastly better than it has ever been for more humans than ever before.
So it's weird, yeah.
Suggest you check historical levels of CO2 before sinking into permanent depression.
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPWmFNAwhvajgpMfPzgX4au...
Colored showing rates of warming or cooling (red=+++, black=--
I think if an emergency happens, we'll be capable enough of mitigating it in the short term until we sort out new agricultural land, move cities, etc. You can move a city in a couple of decades - see most big Chinese cities for proof.
The goal of the news should be to inform, not to comfort.
There's literally nobody to vote for who even has climate on their agenda - it's just not important to the man on the street.
Now, where your middle eastern neighbour puts his penis, and what plants the kids next door burn and inhale - THAT matters!
Many people who would support an independent presidential candidate decide not to because the thing they want the most, above all else, is to keep their pet enemy party out of power. They'll even vote against their own interests and politics to try to achieve that. Yet their pet enemy party (democrat or republican) always wins every now and then regardless. So it's a futile effort with no long term value.
Tell me about that realistic alternative again?
Besides that, what makes you think you can't for for a party that isn't "realistic"? Do you only want to vote for a party that will probably win? Then it's not really you voting on your own preference, you're instead acting as an amplifier for what other people want.
It's a misconception people have assuming their vote is wasted on a minor candidate and somehow contributes to the success of a major one. A single person's vote is negligible no matter who they vote for. When all the people who want candidate X vote for candidate Y instead, then there's a failure of the system.
The electoral system here is really broken, from the gerrymandered constituencies to the FPTP voting system. On the note of FPTP we had a referendum to vote for STV - and propaganda successfully convinced the voters to stick with broken but known. Part of the reason I am so sure we will end up voting to leave the EU. Independent candidates very occasionally win a seat but the deck is so severely stacked against them they may as well not exist. UKIP, who I do not support, are the most successful "outsider" party that has arisen in recent years - and despite a substantial share of the popular vote were decimated in the election.
We are seeing a rise in voting for outsider candidates, but at the current scale it actually helps the incumbent powers, as the opposition vote ends up fragmented.
If we want to save humanity we may need to completely rethink governance, as the current incestuous relationship between powerful governments and powerful interests is literally killing us.
As far as I'm concerned, "blame the government" is really a poor excuse.
A poor person in China cooks with coal instead of electricity from wind or solar because it's cheaper and energy costs represent a huge fraction of his daily expenses.
A well-to-do person in Connecticut doesn't mind that his electricity bill is much higher because of carbon taxes or renewables mandates because energy costs are a much smaller fraction of his expenses, and well-worth a cooler world for his children.
I am convinced that a richer world is much more likely to both reduce CO2 and better adapt to rising temperatures than a poorer world. It will also have the virtue of being a nicer place to live.
This is a long way to say the goal of policy should be reduced carbon intensity, not reduced growth.
It's like you are assuming harvests would go bad everywhere. Actually there are places where you can't grow food right now where you would be able to grow food next once the temperature increases.
Change is not that an issue, the rate of change though...
Rate is change is actually pretty slow in this case.
Really? All the articles and papers say the contrary. Do you have anything to back your claim?
I find the terms "Nature", "Earth", etc really ambiguous in these kind of discussions. Sure "Earth" will be fine, will still orbit the Sun, even if it gets as hot as Venus. Cockroaches or water bears will inherit the Earth.
But people worried are not really worried about "Nature" (at least I am not) but rather about the very people that are sharing the same and only habitable, in our reach at least, planet.
Europe is considered in a major crisis for 3-4 millions Syrian refugees, now imagine if tomorrow there are 100 or 200 millions refugees moving all around the world.
In the end, it is only a "people" issue.
I live in Australia. An island inhabited by a few hundred thousand people using stone-age technology until colonisation. Now there are 25 million of us here.
Yes Europe is having a problem with a few million refugees, but it's less of a problem than it had from 1939-45. And it recovered from that pretty quickly. We're used to a level of peace and comfort unparalleled in human history, and perturbations of that feel like TOTAL DISASTERS to us. We can cope and adapt to much greater events than we would ever believe watching the news.
And yes, Nature will cope. So will we.
Do you have a source for that?
Feel free to ignore the point and my comment if you feel it insufficiently supported by peer-reviewed articles.
I'm sorry I'm unable to assist your learning by giving you a solid reference.
From [0]: > As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming. [0] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page...
It shouldn't. The climate has always been changing. Do that thing that humans do: be adaptable.
I imagine that if lots of people are dying, humanity — that is, the quality of being humane — will not make it: it'll be a riot of chaos, cannibalism, murder &c. Mankind might make it, but humanity won't.
I'm not a climate change denier nor skeptic, but I think the general population are too pessimistic regarding this change. Pessimistic in a sense that we always extrapolate the future with present technologies.
People in 1950 predicted the same pessimistic doomsday by the year 2000; and what happened? People adapted and overcame the situation. Of course if technology hadn't changed since 1950 we would all be "doomed" by the year 2000.
So by saying that we only have 10 or 15 or 30 years more before we all die as a species, because of what we did to the Earth is non-sense. People will always come up with new technologies and they will adapt to the situation.
Pessimists have a very unreliable track record, I'm not saying don't worry about the climate now, but I would love that everybody would recognize the danger, face it and have a more optimistic outlook for the future.
Who specifically is saying this? I’ve read a lot of predictions and speculation by climate scientists, but never anything remotely like “less than 30 years before we die as a species”.
> People in 1950 predicted the same pessimistic doomsday by the year 2000
I haven’t seen these supposed pessimists’ reports from 1950 predicting “doomsday” by 2000. Maybe you can link to the specific prediction you are referring to?
This historical summary from the American Institute of Physics might help, https://www.aip.org/history/climate/public.htm
Most of the work in the 50s–70s led the experts in the field to say, paraphrased, “there’s something serious going on here, and we’d better study it carefully ASAP and figure out how to mitigate our impact, or things could get bad.” The topic wasn’t really a serious concern to the general public until the 1980s, by which time there was starting to be broad agreement among experts. Since then, we’ve filled in a lot of additional details, and there is a strong “scientific consensus” that global warming is a real effect, caused by humans, which will have dramatic consequences if we continue down our current path.
> Who specifically is saying this?
In this thread, madaxe_again: 'Our extinction is coming, and the only tragedy is all the other life we'll take with us.'
> I haven’t seen these supposed pessimists’ reports from 1950 predicting “doomsday” by 2000.
The so-called 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' has been predicting Doomsday since 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
My prediction? In twenty years we'll look back on global warming like we do on D&D suicides, satanic ritual abuse and militias: just another instance of mass hysteria.
- The doomsday clock thing wasn't unfounded paranoia, there was real danger of nuclear war in the 1950's.
Then, are you saying that there is no climate change and temperatures are not raising?
Of course climate change is real; my point was that people tend to overreact to it. They don't see that new technologies and especially new policies are coming up daily just to fight climate change.
Technology is not stagnant in this area, just as how it wasn't stagnant in the 50s 60s 70s 80s etc.
People always come up with new ideas and will adapt to changes.
> Of course climate change is real; my point was that people tend to overreact to it.
How is people overreacting?