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- Hacker News
- As George Carlin said, all we can do at this point is sit back and watch the freak show.by yoyohello13
- We're frogs in a pot of water on a stove.by amelius
- Darn shame - seems we clawed back some time during the peak of the pandemic lockdowns (a surprisingly high amount IIRC)
But we really do seem to have been intent on doubling down since then
by pentaphobe - Here's a grim shower thought: how bad does it have to get before one can justify going to war with governments that are willfully ignoring climate change and endangering all of humankind as a result?by gmueckl
- So, what can individuals do? I can stop using airplanes, stop eating meat, switch to bev and heat pumps, vote for green parties, go to rallies against fossil energy and tell my friends to do all that as well. Yet I still have a government (German), that reverses everything its somewhat progressive predecessor did with regards to climate change. And other countries are in an even worse spot. It just looks like everyone need to accept that we will simply not doing enough and that everyone under 20 will face 3°C global warming.by _ink_
- The problem is not just temperature, is speed. The idea was to avoid the 1.5°C mark, by 2100, but we are reaching it now, while still having the feet on the pedal, while the reached compromise by most nations were to try to be carbon neutral by 2060.
And while that, positive feedback loops get powered up, and adaptation gets harder because the speed of change. Even if we manage to do something to i.e. protect the crops we directly depend on, the rest of the system may fall down, or adapt in harmful for us directions.
We got lucky in the Holocene, with predictable enough climate to develop agriculture and civilization after it, but it was not the norm in Earth history, and we are ending that opportunity.
by gmuslera - We may or may not have hit the physical point of no return. It doesn't really matter, because we obviously hit the point of political no return a long time ago.
In too much of the world, nobody with any kind of power cares. (My own country included.) It's the prisoner's dilemma yet again: why should any of us who might care cooperate, when everyone else is cheating?
We hit that point a long, long time ago.
The situation isn't hopeless, I think, but this talk of "point of no return" doesn't work because it doesn't acknowledge the reality that, as ever, it's political and some people actively do not want to address it.