The planet’s average temperature hit 17.23 degrees Celsius on Thursday, surpassing the 17.18C record set on Tuesday and equalled on Wednesday.
A toast to everyone in this thread that decided to not have kids! 🥂
a toast to everyone in this thread that will be burnt to toast because unchecked greed and capitalism.
Hear hear!
I will never create and subject a human being to the world our negligence has created.
About 15 years ago I was going somewhere with my family. Stepmom and I were talking about Climate Change then, how if things didn’t change that massive starvation was likely, that crazed weather would be irreversible, etc. and she noticed that my 10 year old niece’s eyes were getting huge. She was genuinely disturbed by the conversation and began to say is this really going to happen? Before I could plainly reply my stepmom reassured her that no, things were going to be fine, and we changed the subject.
Niece is in mid twenties now and subject to the reality of the situation as it slowly unfolds, like an asteroid headed toward the earth at 5 mph. The future is dreadful to her.
Yeah, it’s great to know we’ll die off!
I mean, it’s also great that we’re not leaving behind offspring to have progressively poorer lives until it’s just Event Horizon: Earth.
If we all had this point of view, that’d be the end of us.
The consequences of inaction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be the end of us. 😀 To hope otherwise or lament over is just wasting time. Enjoy life before it gets worse!
That’s a rather pessimistic view. Yes, it will be hard as fuck. Yes, unfortunately it will be the end of some us. But I think we as a race will prevail and I don’t think simply giving up right now is an option.
I thought that too until I learned about what could happen if ocean acidification gets a lot worse.
I do agree the human race will prevail, but honestly I just wish we didn’t. like wtf just look around us and all the shit we caused.
It will be either way
that’s one of the biggest reasons for my decision not to
As a side benefit, I also have all the money and free time to spend with furry children instead!
I’m never having kids. Had things been easier, maybe I would’ve had kids but it’s hard enough to look out for myself as it is and having kids anyway like many people do is the worst move I could possibly make. Not having kids will have consequences against the absolute tyrants in charge of it all some day. Not having kids in protest to the system (or at least until things improve for the common person) is just doing your patriotic duty at this point.
I want to have kids. But bringing them into a poisoned and dying world where they have to earn the right to exist? That just seems cruel
If we get past the next few decades, I’ll bring them into a world worth living in
Ditto. Not that I’d have the opportunity, but decided I’d only adopt if I desired to raise a child.
That’s a good call! If I ever get the hankering to have kids I’ll just do that. We do that with dogs (rescue), why not humans?
Exponentially increasing heat is when toddlers amirite
(also you should still adopt kids)
I think it’s important to note that this also coincides with the start of what’s predicted to be a super El Nino (we’ve had a couple of those already). If the model holds true then 2024 will be even hotter than this year, and (again, if the model predictions are right) will shatter all previous records. Then come 2025 or 2026 average temperatures will settle down a bit.
The issue isn’t the seasonal or even the yearly hottest temps. It’s the overall trend that’s a concern (which is what the article is talking about), which are trending up.
Not sure if any of that made sense.
Makes sense, but the idea of a “super” El Nino is a symptom of the same problem. Super implies unusual or abnormal, and it’s only getting worse.
Well yes, the super El Nino’s are part of climate change. They are getting worse each time. All I was saying is that it’s not a straight year over year increase. It comes in waves or heaves in a periodic manner.
I thought the impact of climate change on El Nino was not really settled (notably due to the erratic nature of the ENSO), do you happen to have a source on that?
I don’t know, honestly. But these videos have some good info.
Thanks, I’ll have a look!
right so considering we’ve been seeing alarming loss of ice mass over the last couple of years and we know that has an exponential effect on climate change. We already hit the tipping point just most people didn’t realize it.
Ya probably. I’m still hoping that there’s some global mechanism that we don’t understand yet that will limit or reign in the effects. But that’s just wishful thinking.
Of course there is a limit. The question is how high it is. For instance, at high enough CO2 concentrations, the greenhouse effect doesn’t get much stronger anymore. Also, the more CO2, the faster it dissapears by eroding rocks. That happens on a geological timescale, though.
If we did something to lower temperature, I’d be very worried about the CO2 concentration’s other effect: feeling like suffocating all the time.
The problem is when the temps come back down, climate deniers will go “WhAt HaPpEnEd?”.
The world is ending but at least I can post about it
China’s also building a lot of nuclear plants and what they claim will be the biggest nuclear plant in the world.
Not that it negates building coal plants, but it’s not a simple issue. They’re growing faster than the energy industry can keep up with.
And like others have said, the rest of the world is at fault too. Germany shut down all of its nuclear plants, which forced them to go heavy into coal. And not just any coal, but lignite which is considered the dirtiest of all types of coal.
And like others have said, the rest of the world is at fault too. Germany shut down all of its nuclear plants, which forced them to go heavy into coal. And not just any coal, but lignite which is considered the dirtiest of all types of coal.
That’s a weird way of spelling wind and solar
Looks like coal has increased from 2021 to 2022 as nuclear decreased.
Nothing else happened at all in 2022 that could explain this, and it is definitely the trend. /s
How fucking stupid do you think people are?
It was your source man. Don’t get mad at me that it shows the opposite of what you claimed.
Germany in particular pisses me off so much. No country bought into the fear mongering about nuclear energy after Fukushima as much as Germany did. Shutting down nuclear power plants in the face of climate change is so incredibly irresponsible. For all of their faults, I give a lot of credit to the US and France for not shying away from using nuclear energy.
…and decreasing the utilisation of their coal fleet to the point where their coal consumption for electricity is flat and set to start decreasing next year.
And their renewable energy share is higher than the US (and most of the world) and increasing faster.
Stop whatabouting and fix your own shit.
Stop whatabouting and fix your own shit.
Seems hard, no thanks.
Does Chinese inaction absolve all responsibility of the West?
Classic whataboutism
Who’s engaging in whataboutism?
…of course it doesn’t? Like what kinda point is that?
Unless you’re Chinese, there’s very little you can do to stop that, as opposed to encouraging your country’s politicians who have proven commitment to curb climate change.
So “China builds 5 coal plants every day before breakfast” is the whataboutism here.
China produces a lot of stuff. The whole capitalist consumer drive force is world wide. Not sure what you expect to be able to do though.
The point is that this poster is a WuMao and will say anything to try and support the Chinese government. Sad that they have wormed their way in here already.
I am not WuMao. I simply don’t appreciate useless finger pointing and implied righteousness to justify doing nothing just because some other country isn’t doing what they can either.
We’re all watching the world burn and this finger pointing is doing little else but assure a very painful future.
But this user isn’t diverting attention from an American policy or whatever. The original post was on how we have the hottest days so far and they rightly pointed out that a government was building lots of coal plants in that context. Others have chimed in and said that the government also is investigating in renewable, though I question if that makes building coal plants okay.
None of this is whataboutism. No one is above criticism or scrutiny.
What I see is directing attention at China as a polluter and placing effectively sole blame on them.
I feel like my point stands and it’s a perfect example of strongly implied whataboutism.
What I see is directing attention at China as a polluter and placing effectively sole blame on them.
Sounds like a “you” problem then. No nation should be expanding coal burning.
Well, Australia is selling them all the coal.
National pride ✨
But I wanna blame China.
Same same same. It’s all their fault for manufacturing all of our shit and still having half of the CO2 emissions per capita compared to the US.
We’re paying them to produce this pollution.
A total of 106 GW of new coal power projects were permitted, the equivalent of two large coal power plants per week .
The size of coal-fired power generating units varies widely; the actual number of permitted units was 168 at 82 different plant sites.
Cool. Nothing to see here. Totally fine. It’s not like western Washington is needing AC in the summer every year now for the first time in literally ever.
Should we take a moment to recognise that battling climate change with air conditioning is not a long-term winning strategy??
My electricity bill went up 50% due to the AC alone. It’s getting THAT bad
So just broil to death in the name of ‘climate religion’?
Oh no… people in the PNW might not have great weather all the time anymore.
Oh no…
All the time lol? I guess if you like 9 months of grey full sky’s then sure.
This is going to be painful for us as a species. I don’t think it will render us extinct, but the weather will get significantly worse and we will probably see widespread coastal flooding in this century, which will lead to hundreds of millions of refugees. We still have plenty of time to prepare and to change course, but I fear that we will wait until a global crisis is on our doorstep before we make serious changes.
Millennials had the honour to participate in wars for pil. The coming generations will have the pleasure to kill over fresh water
Also climate refugees will become a regular thing, people doing anything to pass borders as it’s life or death for particularly exposed nations. This is already happening but will no doubt get even worse, breeding even more extremism and nationalism that bring onto a whole other slew of issues as a package deal of extreme nationalism. Fun times.
deleted by creator
Any corrections we make won’t take major effect until well after we are fucked. It’s why having kids is kind of insane to me because they are going to have a fucked future.
On the other hand, there is no one else, probably in the whole universe, who can preserve life as we know it. And I am not just talking about humans.
Think about philosophical questions like: “What is the reason life exists?”. Potentially, the answer is there is no reason. But what if there is something else out there which could give life a reason to exist?
Perhaps somewhere down a million years some lifeform could make the universe continue to exist. When we die now this is quite literally the end. No one else will preserve life beyond the existence of the earth or our solar system when someday the sun burns out. I highly doubt octopuses or cockroaches will evolve to build space ships and protect life any time soon. It’s just us.
In agreement with your broader point but a different approach: to say that we should die out as a species due to climate change is over-simplifying, imo. Yes, there are hardships ahead and we truly need to look at ourselves as a species and ask what needs to change for the sake of ethics and others. However, we have been in dire situations before, albeit with less foreknowledge. Would someone living in, say, 1840 have wished that humanity had died out in the bronze age collapse, when the near-entirety of known civilization collapsed due to climate change?
When considering the entire species we can’t take such a short term view. Yes, hard times are ahead. Yes, we will get through it. I say if one is inclined not to have kids, he should not have kids. But if one is inclined to do so, he should do so
I’d strongly recommend the book “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch for a wider perspective on what you’ve stated. Humanity has always had problems and been in some ways on the verge of extinction perpetually, but we as a species find ways to solve these problems.
It’s weird how many users resort to instant doom and gloom (like not having kids?) when its another problem that will take hard work to solve. Just a quote from his book -
“It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble. By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them.”
Yes,but…
The problem as I see it, is we’d need to revert to what’s little better than subsistence farming (in a village model) in order to weather the storm that’s coming. That’s fundamentally at odds with people’s day to day interest and our greed…
Carbon sequestering helps, but we still need to drastically downsize our daily conveniences (oh, and fuck cars!), which our brain is basically wired against doing (in terms of a short term pain with an eye on the long term benefit).
I agree we likely need to downsize a lot of our daily conveniences (yeah fuck cars!) But I’d urge against trying to envision the solution before working on solving the problem. Saying we need to resort to subsistence farming in communities - why? We create food on a massive scale currently, and tons of it go to waste. Additionally so much of agriculture is lost to inefficiency through the meat industry.
Surely it would make more sense to focus on those two levers first before resorting to what sounds like feudal society.
Not looking to debate details, just urging a rational and realistic approach through steps that are achievable.
We are not that special. And if we were, it wouldn’t matter anyway. We are just going to kill ourselves.
Ah, the cynics are truly everywhere.
Or realists?
Definitely sounds like something a cynic would say.
Until we find life on other worlds we can’t reallt say that for sure
Except we can… it’s an infinite universe with countless worlds just like our own. Life in the cosmos isn’t a possibility, but a certainty.
What other species do you know that can potentially travel the universe and perhaps even bring life to other planets? How is that not special?
Keep an eye on congress 👀
Oh that’s an easy one, life exists to further the entropy of the universe. That’s the only reason. Entropy cannot be reversed, and it’s extreme is inevitable.
I don’t think it will render us extinct.
Oh, it probably will, though the memory of us may live on after that.
In fact, arguably it happened long ago, and we’re currently in an echo of the past in a very immersive history lesson simultaneously teaching the grandeur and folly of humanity.
I mean, even if we went extinct tomorrow our mark on this planet is permanent because of all the damn plastic, much of which will probably fossilize. Even still, the extreme weather and extinction events on the way I don’t think are enough to end us, there will probably be some stragglers that struggle by in the ashes of the old world if nothing else.
I know it’s entirely coincidental, but we dealt with a heat-exhaustion-approaching-heat-stroke emergency this week, and it definitely made me pause. Summer heat is taking on a new meaning.
I’m a landscaper and I joked about dealing with wildfires becoming part of my job duties in ten years last year. This year, I was lucky enough to deal with both the Pine Barrens wildfires and the Canadian Wildfire smoke in NJ
deleted by creator
For one brief moment, stocks were at an all-time high… What else could matter?
/s for anyone who can’t grasp sarcasm
It would be irresponsible to stop drilling more oil.
Source: shell.Green energy companies have shareholders and profits too. So yes, definitely think of the shareholders and profits
I used to worry about this a lot, I still do but I used to too.
Joking aside, it’s a shit show that us plebians can’t really do anything about but I still try. I’ve driven a hybrid for the last 6 years, I have a smart thermostat to try to save energy, I try to eat less meat more often. I recycle a lot more than most. I even make my own bread and nut milks and many other things which is not only cheaper and healthier (and WAY more delicious) but requires less transport related greenhouse gas emissions than buying premade breads and nut milks. Nut milk is especially better than dairy milk in that matter.
Oh yeah! And yesterday I picked up 10 large trash bags of litter:
Bro you’re doing more than most of us, thank you.
But yeah, our carbon footprint is minuscule in comparison to corporate footprints. We need them to fucking play ball.
What’s more profitable: Exceptional profits for 30 years until civilization collapses, or sustainable profits forever?
All I could think about when reading this post is corporate footprints. It’s great for us to all do our part, but sadly the corporations not doing their part is screwing everybody. We need more regulations on them, idc what product they’re making or how much profit they’d like or even how many people whine about not receiving that product it needs to stop.
Honestly, corporate footprints is all that needs to be thought about when thinking about climate change.
The shifting of blame to the individual or even putting it on the individual to “help” is avoiding the real issue. And even if individuals are contributing, which I acknowledge they are but at a much lower rate of impact, then probably the best way to change individual consumption/waste is once again by abolishing capitalism which guides the production of the material reality utilized to create such individual waste in the first place.
Sure, but it’s our fault too, at least in part - we’re the one’s buying the stuff that the corporations produce. Of course some of it is due to there not being any alternatives (for example decent public transport so you don’t have to own a car) but some of it is also because we actively choose cheaper products, buy new things instead of second-hand and so on.
What we need (which we all seem to agree on) is more regulations so that corporations have to their part and then the individuals simply won’t have the option to choose the more polluting product.
Corporate footprints are done on our behalf, in order to manufacture the goods and services we buy.
The real problem is that “vote with your dollars” fundamentally doesn’t work because human nature is selfish and short-sighted, so regulation is necessary.
btw note that the carbon footprint of one person’s lifetime is equiv to 1 second of worldwide factory emissions (source: kurzgesagt), so it’s not a necessity to do some of the things you’re doing, but i would recommend that everyone in the world do some farming, even if it’s a small garden of radishes or smth, or tomatoes on a windowsill
also this is only tangentially related, but i still drink cow milk, because: -A it tastes good
-B I am allergic to all nut milks
-C soy milk sounds like crap, soy is already in basically everything (rip the few people who are allergic to it), so i wouldn’t want to consume more of it
A: if we know cow milk is bad for the planet and bad for the animal, and we use “but I prefer it!” as an excuse, couldn’t we apply that to everything? Sexual assault? “It feels good!”. Theft? “I like having stuff!”
B: (in order of ease and taste) Oat milk, rice milk, flax milk, hemp milk
C: Soy milk… “sounds like crap”? We might be at the end of carnivore arguments. You know cow milk literally has faeces in it, right? The fact “soy is in everything” being used to not have it is also not logical. Water is in everything.
I’m not going to go point by point because I think it’s not productive to act as if this kind of argument has only two sides. When we talk about subjects in a persuasive fashion, where we’re trying to win someone over to our side, it frequently has the opposite effect, entrenching is into our already polarized views.
We need to concern ourselves with moral relativism to make appropriate decisions. In an ethical sense, I believe sexual assault of a human is at least an order of magnitude worse than milking a cow. But that opinion comes largely from the fact that I’m a human and I’m not a cow.
If we want to sway someone’s opinion, I think we should focus less on absolutes and more on quantities. We should meet people where they are. Maybe instead of driving home all the disturbingly true reasons we should never milk or even breed cattle, we should use those same arguments to highlight the absurdly destructive impact of doing those things at the scale which we are.
If half of society has a burger and a milkshake once a month, there is a significant environmental impact on milking those cows and raising those cattle to be slaughtered, as well as a very real moral cost. There is also some emotional benefit to the human of consuming fats and proteins from those sources. And both positive and negative nutritional effects as well.
It’s already difficult to compare costs and benefits from such wildly different categories when it’s just one burger a month. Humans are emotional beings and even a well-reasoned argument may not trump the emotional feeling one gets from a hamburger and a shake.
But consider the changing of factors if those same people go from one beef product and one dairy product a month to one every other day. Or even more frequent. How much more land it takes, how much more suffering the livestock go through in conditions designed for maximum profit and minimum concern for moral costs. The additional methane production, the deforestation, the added risk of heart attacks. All the bad parts multiplied wholesale, while the good parts all experience diminishing returns.
If you take one of those semi-daily beef and dairy consumers, and give them a hard line, where any consumption of beef or dairy is unacceptable, is that going to generate a positive or a negative effect on the system as a whole? Some may be convinced to quit consuming, but I feel their difference will be swallowed by those who feel called out in such a way that they would rather consume even more out of principle than face the hard truth that their lifestyle is wrong. It’s easy for humans to build walls of cognitive dissonance, where we know what we’re doing is harmful, but we make excuses for ourselves to avoid facing that reality.
If you want the masses to face their collective reality, we need to meet people where they are. Maybe burgers and milkshakes will always be part of your life. But there are alternatives that can be a different part of a life rich in variety. If someone currently eats a burger every other day, maybe they can strive for once a week. And if that goes well, once a month. And then, once they have a greater familiarity with the culinary variety that’s possible, they may start to forget to eat that meal entirely.
We should remember that we’re all just people. We don’t need to be on different sides. You don’t need to be wrong and neither do I. We’re just earthly passengers connecting electronically in a wide cosmos. Our lives are all so different and yet uncannily familiar. So we’ll get more mileage out of sharing our experiences than prescribing them to others. Because if we feel we’re being talked down to, we’ll decide we’ve already picked a side. But if we’re just sharing, then we’re all on the same endless side. In that spirit, none of what I’m saying is meant to invalidate anything you’ve said. Only add to it.
And just to add, I don’t mind if there’s a bit of feces in my milk. It looks perfectly white, so I imagine it’s in low enough quantity that it’s not a health risk after pasteurization, and as far as I know, the quantity is also low enough that it doesn’t effect taste. But I think cows should have good lives even at the expense of productivity, and milking should be a voluntary behavior, perhaps in exchange for appropriate compensation, rather than something that’s forced on them. Just my two cents (plus about a buck fifty).
I’m not going to argue against anything you’ve said, I’m not going to try to fact check it, & I believe to be largely correct.
I also think its irrelevant.
In the next few years (couple of decades) we are going to see increased wildfire burning of the boreal forests in the global north which is going to release (what I believe is technically called) “a catastrophe fuck-ton” of gasses into the atmosphere. We’ve tipped over the tipping point.
About the wildfires, they aren’t just caused by heatwaves, but also indiscriminate firefighting. If you stop fires in a forest over and over, the amount of flammable material keeps increasing due to new plants growing, and if there’s a lot of flammable material, and the same amount of water as before, things are overall drier, and would also create a bigger fire should one ignite.
And no, I don’t have a peer-reviewed study/source concerning this; I just used reasoning to construct this argument.
You’re on point. That’s why Reduce is the first of the three R’s. I was educated to the horrors of dairy farming a couple years ago and just stopped buying milk completely, switching to nut milk then finally oat milk. But I still eat cheese and yogurt. I stopped eating steak every other week but I still have one a few times a year. And since it’s so infrequent, I don’t mind buying the really nice cuts. So it became quality over quantity.
It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. You can still enjoy the tasty things. But a reduction in volume and frequency will still have a big impact if enough people do it.
Cow milk has faeces in it?
No it does not.
It’s like saying municipal water has shit in it if it is treated water. Yeah it did once…. That’s why we have filtering and sterilizing technologies.
If milk had cow shit in it people would constantly be getting sick from it it.
That said, dairy farming is pretty horrific in many ways. It’s good to cut down on dairy consumption as much as is tolerable for each person.
It’s like saying municipal water has shit in it if it is treated water.
Water? Awful stuff, don’t drink it. Fish fuck in it.
The poop in cow milk is referring to the bacteria in unpasteurized milk if I’m interpreting it correctly (or it could be waste from cells in the cow’s blood, since cow milk starts out as cow blood iirc)
It doesn’t. Unless you live in US. US food is full of shit no matter what you eat, lol.
btw note that the carbon footprint of one person’s lifetime is equiv to 1 second of worldwide factory emissions (source: kurzgesagt)
I love kurzgesagt but this comparison is… it’s like two abstractions multiplied.
This is the coolest summer you’ll have for the rest of your life
Well when you put it that way…
Cool
“sooner than expected”, “tipping point”, “nonbinding resolution”, “climate scientists warn”
Everything is fine…
Nothing to see here!
Phew!
How about my dividends, are they safe?
Reminds me of a story I read about how if you had a can of food and bacteria got into it, and every day the bacteria doubled in size, and somehow this bacteria had conversations with itself with all of the other bacterias in the can about how long the food would last.
How long would it be before everything ran out?
At some point, the smart bacteria would stand up and say, “Hey, my fellow Amoebas, we’ve used 1/4 of all of the food in the can! If we’re not careful and if we don’t manage our resources we will run out of food!”
And the politician bacteria would say, “Don’t worry, everyone, we have 3 times as much food as we’ve ever used in all the months of our existence still in the can!”
And the bacteria was fruitful, and multiplied.
And when they hit the halfway mark the next day, the smart bacteria would stand up and say, “Hey my fellow Amoebas, we’ve used half of all of the food in the can! If we’re not careful and if we don’t manage our resources we will run out of food!”
And the bacteria politicians would say, “Everyone! Don’t worry! We still have as much food left as we have used in our entire existence to this point!”
And the bacteria was fruitful, and multiplied.
And then another day passed, and all of the bacteria died.
There’s also a good example of exponential change described using a doubling drop of water in The Power of Compounding
The “This is fine” meme has never been more appropriate
Man am I glad I decided not to have kids.
This summer is the coolest summer you’ll experience in the rest of your life.
deleted by creator
On average, it will be.
Yeah, I have the windows open right now and yesterday I wore a sweatshirt. Its usually 110+ right now.
