Lest we forget that 10 years ago the problem was global warming, 20 years before was the ozone hole layer and 30 years before was global cooling.
I prefer "climate change". Unlike global warming or cooling or holes where they got were proven wrong, this time the joke is that "climate changes" and they never lose because it does change, all the time.
Take a good look on the measures taken in the name of climate, too often they result in massive profits for some entities without truly reducing global waste, which indeed is a serious problem that we should be focused in addressing.
Similarly, global warming is a huge problem today and threatens our future. We will fix it just like we did the ozone hole, but again it will take decades of lawsuits, science, public outcry.
The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy.
The second being what you meant in your last paragraph. It’s hard to actually address waste, overconsumption, and pollution when our economy and government is controlled by a handful of corps, who are getting better and better at greenwashing.
Well this time it's a lot worse because not using CFCs had a comparatively small impact on the world economy, with a big payoff.
There is currently no realistic path to keep somewhat decent living standards for the number of people we have, while ramping down the world economy sufficiently to battle global warming.
Even if everybody turned vegan and stopped flying it wouldn't be enough.
What most people forget is that pollution comes from the basic need of survival and improving life quality. So you need efficiency and balance what matters for most humans.
Instead of forcing everyone to become vegan and to stop flying, how about supporting the industries that create artificial meat cheaper than the real thing and airplanes that run on electricity? (both of these things already exist nowadays)
I was saying everybody turning vegan and stopping flying entirely wouldn't be enough.
Flying on electricity and lab grown meat still use a lot of energy compared to not having those.
You're actually making my point really well. Extreme measures aren't enough, so why not do less than that? Nobody wants to give up their quality of life. Especially not sufficiently to stop climate change.
Don't see a problem in using more energy. There is already nuclear power since decades, just use it.
Global cooling: 1970s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
Ozone layer depletion: succesfully mitigated starting in the 1980s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_for_the_Pr...
Anthropogenic global warming: scientific consensus since around 1990 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report
For reference, it's the year 2023 now.
End result for europeans is paying more taxes while other places keep doing far worse. I'll be damned to yet see any of those groups advocating for more nuclear power around here to save the environment.
Sure this isn't binary and plenty has improved in regards to ecology when you want to nitpick on reddit-style, what truly bothers me is the sheer percentage of green washing instead of focus on real improvement.
Both got solved with the same approach. If you went ahead getting untested vaccines into your body then for sure you also tolerate more taxes in name of "climate change".
Albeit we live on the same planet it does seem we live in two different worlds and look at the same things in opposite manner. I don't care what "science" has to say or whatever happy reality you live where "collective action" happens.
Of course, going back to the climate the Earth had in the Cambrian era, for instance, probably would not be comfortable to humans at all, but still, humans have survived for a much longer time than is illustrated here. Human civilization, OTOH, occupies about half the time period shown here.
The thing that's most important about climate change is: how will it affect human settlements where they're located now? You can't just pick up whole cities with billions of people and move them, and many (most?) of the cities are close to water.
If you think going back more than 20k years would in any way change the entire point of the cartoon[1], then by all means do the research, draw the graph and show where it's wrong.
[1] hint: rate of change is important.
Anyway, it's not anti-science. It's well-known that the earth was hotter during the time of the dinosaurs. Sure, rate of change is important, but as I said in the end, the biggest problem for humans is rising sea levels, because of where humans live. Worse storms are also a big problem, though here again where humans live is a big problem since they tend to live on coasts and storms usually hit there.
It's classic climate denial to continue to harp that the earth was hotter in the past so somethingsomethingsomething look over there and ignore the fact that the rate of change this century, not looking back a million years, is the point of the comic.
But we do have recent examples of much quicker temperature changes. During the Younger Dryas the global average temp dropped about 5°C over a few decades and about 1000 years later, rose again just as quickly.
In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras.
For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.