I ought to care but I’ve lost that ability. Annihilation is not scary. I won’t be alive or awake to experience it.
Do you understand?
No.
Yea, the graph showing us up 4 standard deviations isn’t easy to understand implications. But I imagine on a person level, it’s something like “if you live somewhere hot and humid, you better make sure you can afford to run and repair your AC”. On a global level, mammals have existed for 200,000,000 years, yet in 200 years we’ve toyed with global extinction for shareholder profits.
Meh, humans will survive, literally, unless Antarctica heats over 200 degrees from now, we can survive somewhere on the planet. We won’t prosper, there will be billions of deaths and an unimaginable about of loss, but short of planned deliberate nuclear war or large asteroid, we’ll survive a little.
Cool, nothing to worry about then!
I do, but like most other people, I’m preoccupied with short term crises since, well, I need to survive those in order to be ready for the long-term ones.
In my opinion though, we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. The elite will manage to hang just a bit longer, but eventually they’ll cook and burn with the rest of us, or in their bunkers.
Anyways, shit’s already fucked to the point that I’ve given up. Just sit back, relax and take whatever life gives ya.
I agree and I am not even preoccupied, but there simply hasn’t been any chance for me to make a dent in this. Hasn’t been for a long time, at least since 1900 (!!) where we basically already knew where everything was headed.
This is exactly the messaging of the oil companies and others who oppose climate action now that it’s too hard to deny. They want us to think it’s hopeless and give up trying to change anything. It’s not too late. Green energy is growing exponentially and has been possibly the fastest technological adoption in history. Millions of people are working on the science and technology to solve these problems. We just need some more collective action at the local and national levels. Carbon taxes, funding for green initiatives, local agriculture, and support for alternative transportation like e-bikes or other PEVs to start
Did you miss the memo that current AI is already using more power than everything we’ve managed to save with green energy in the last decade? We ARE fucked, the only thing we’re still debating is the exact timespan. Which is asinine, the result will remain the same either way.
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war, becausing nothing else will convince people. We’ve been trying (and failing) for decades.
I need some anon to write me a virus that will wipe out all datacenters in one go, something that will irrevocably fry all enterprise hardware beyond repair. Let’s start over, with decent trust busting and without the plastic this time.
(edit: I guess it’s not entirely clear but I’m expecting such a virus to hit the reset button on civilisation. Mass death, yes, but we won’t fuck the world beyond being liveable.)
The world will be fine
It will take a long time in our timespan, and we won’t be fine, but the world will. Just a minor blip in the history of this marble
The world will be fine.
People are fucked.
- George Carlin
Should i kill myself before all that unravels?
No, there’s always a shimmer of hope and the non zero chance that we mean something for someone that could make a difference, or help make the difference ourselves. Even sometimes the tiniest good-hearted gesture will do it.
Did you miss the memo that current AI is already using more power than everything we’ve managed to save with green energy in the last decade?
You got a source on that? Cause that sounds fake
Here’s one:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243v1
Below is an article on crypto mining, not AI, but I’d wager a guess and say you certainly can draw parallels from it:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023EF003871
Also, whatever the source of green/renewable energy is, it takes a couple years to offset the manufacturing of said energy source:
https://www.cooleffect.org/solar-carbon-footprint
So even if there’s no direct source on that 10 year claim, it probably isn’t too farfetched!
The article you linked doesn’t support your claims, is unpublished and reads like the homework of some undergrads.
Training AI models, while computationally expensive, cannot compare to crypto farms the size of warehouses everywhere around the world.
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war
Good news! The odds are looking pretty high for both of those!
I keep saying, if Putin starts a nuclear war, we might save humanity. A nuclear winter will cool the planet. And with most of us dying of radiation poisoning, we won’t have the ability to start pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. Yay!
Carbon taxes fix the problem of using energy for dumb things. Climate change isn’t caused by us using energy, it’s caused by the fact that carbon pollution is free.
Bingo. Power usage isn’t the central problem, it’s the sources of power.
The only way I see to a path to salvation is a huge pandemic or world war, becausing nothing else will convince people
We had a pandemic already and war in Ukraine is raging on - and both only served right wing extremists to rise and ignore climate problems even harder. We are fucked. I don’t give up hope but it’s tiny
Necessity is the mother of invention, and new technology is only going to continue to use more and more energy. Conservation is not the answer.
If the power is renewable, who cares how much it uses? Things are far from hopeless.
Because that power could have been used by someone else who’s depending on coal instead. You cannot separate power sources when on the grid.
That’s why we’re working to get rid of fossil fuel power generation entirely.
If solving the problem becomes impossible, the backup plan should be retribution, not complacency. That way they have an incentive to work with us.
I do what I can. It’s certainly not as much as I could be doing, but it’s what I have the mental and emotional capacity to handle. I don’t have a ton of hope either, and it’s a big reason I decided not to have children, but I wouldn’t say I’ve given up completely.
We deserve it. Let the insects have their turn.
Speak for yourself.
Humanity is just going to go through a culling. There will definitely be humans and there will definitely be habitable areas of the planet but there won’t be room for all 8 billion of us and depending on how much we actually do right now will determine how big the actual final number is
And honestly, would that be such a bad thing? 8 freaking billion of us is at least 7.5B too many.
People who say this imagine themselves and their families in the 0.5B but will end up in the 7.5B, suffering immeasurably in the process.
Nope, there’s nothing special about me or my family. We’re just insignificant eurotrash. Odds we’d be among the survivors are very low.
Nah I tried to get as close to the cities I think would be bombed so that I can go out in a puff of ozone
And you’ll be first in line to be a member of the 7.5B that gets culled, right?
Actually yes, but that has more to do with 20 years of crippling depression and chronic pain than the coming climate disasters.
You can kill me right now if you want.
I dunno why the assumption is that everyone who makes the observation on overpopulation is so self-interested that they can’t imagine their own demise as part of it. We’ll all die in the approaching climate disaster, including you and me. The difference between now and later is small on a geological timescale.
You can kill me right now if you want.
Spare your self-contempt for somebody that cares.
You asked.
I did, unfortunately.
“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”
Yeah, fuck that Bircher Bullshit from “The Guidestones.”
I never had kids of my own, because I didn’t want any, but the last 15 years or so I’ve becoming increasingly grateful that I made that decision. It at least allows me to sit back and contemplate doom without worrying about what my kids’ life on this planet is going to be like after I’m gone.
I’ve always done the reducing, reusing, and recycling, because it’s the right thing to do. Cut waaaaay back on dairy and beef purchases, I eat a lot of plant protein and use plant milk now. But it’s all a drop in the bucket. Only the governments can actually fix this, and they won’t because they are owned. I just sit around hoping it won’t get TOO bad before I’m dead.
The fiduciary responsibility scene from the new Fallout show hit hard.
S1E6
“Morton played a rancher who owned half of Missouri.”
“And what happens when the cattle ranchers have more power than the sheriff?”
“The whole town burns down.”
“Right, the whole town burns down. Vault-Tec is a trillion dollar company that owns half of everything. And after ten years of war, the U.S. gov’t is broker than a joke. The cattle ranchers are in charge, Coop.”
Actually, no! Once the really BIG human die-offs start, the hyperwealthy will ‘bunker up’ for a while and once the population shrinks back down, we won’t be putting out all that greenhouse gas anymore, and the earth will cool back down. They’ll keep a few cities in places like Norway or what have you around to keep providing food and fuel for their choppers and parties.
New Zealand and Hawaii. They’re already doing it.
I know several billionaires are already doing this in Hawaii. I feel like Hawaii is a bad choice. But I suppose if you have a giant yacht it’s not a problem.
But I feel like you’d want land with slaves under armed guard that till fields and raise livestock.
And shock collars to keep your security team “loyal.”
I was thinking you keep your security as part of the elite class, they would live basically as well as you and your other elites family / friend class. Maybe even with arranged marriages to ensure their offspring will be part of this same class, like royalty. You could build this into your society/culture. Maybe serving as a guard is like something every royal does for five or ten years.
The problem is it’s human nature to feel envy, and anger, towards people hoarding resources if you’re not one of those people. It’s all fun and games until the peasants revolt and take your wife and children hostage. And if you don’t share, they eventually will.
I read an article on the internet that says you’re wrong, and it’s chemtrails and 5G. And Big Pharma.
And solar. And wind mills. And what they did to General Lee. And Aunt Jemima.
Do your research, sheeple!
Wishing this graph could include data from further back.
This is a little more aloof, but still a good reference to the scale of change we’ve created since the Industrial Revolution.
Back when most of the North was encased in ice?
Before the white walkers
tHe lIbRuLs wAnT tO TaKe oUR tRuCkS!!!
iTs AlL sO tHeY cAn MaKe Us FuCk gAY fRaWgS
Sexy sexy frogs…
Drop everything
… and? Panic? Die?
Preferably. Dieing and then panicking is a lot less effective.
No Man’s Sky just got a cool update, so I think I’m gonna play that while I await my doom.
The people who tweeted this suck at Communication 101. You’ve gotta have a specific and clear call to action. Something like “Join this protest at XYZ” or “Demand your Congressman support ABC.”
You can’t just say “Drop everything. Forget about your job and your kid’s education.” That’s not an effective message.
Unless their point is we’re past the point of protests and political policies doing anything and we’re all gonna die. In which case, say that. “Drop everything and go die, cause we’re fucked.” You gotta be clear!
Yeah there’s a good chunk of this country that would react to this kind of message by heading to the gun store to stock up. Not exactly helpful.
Maybe it’s time to take suicide seriously…
If we take it at face value, it would seem the audience they are targeting would not care to participate in xyz and would not care to ask the congressman to vote abc, probably because those things are not in their own financial interest. But that’s not actually who this is targeting. It’s targeting the rest of us, who are already aware of those people. But we can’t do anything about it.
I think part of the post is the implication that there is no more call to action, only a downward spiral that no action could solve.
Doomerism is propaganda.
Never kill yourself for something that’s somebody else’s fault.
(Looking for this image has definitely put me on a watchlist)
Now the body of one soul I adore wants to die
You have always told me you’d not live past 25
I say, stay long enough to repay all who caused strife
Drop and roll.
Jokes aside, go outside, touch grass, plant some trees. Rinse and repeat
Maybe someone needs to give the memo to these assholes, eh?
It’s not oil companies that burn the oil they pump, it’s their customers. I know it’s easy and convenient to point the fingers at this shitty industry and shift all the blame to them, but it’s also not how we can solve the problem.
…And that’s why we should be busting street dealers never direct out outrage at the kingpins providing the fentanyl! It’s in no way their fault that people are dying!
/s, just in case.
If fentanyl disappeared overnight we would all be better. If oil disappears overnight we are all dead.
You don’t solve global warming with simplistic analogies and “oil companies are responsible for everything”
No we wouldn’t be
Good luck producing enough food, water and other essentials while suddenly cutting all oil production. The entire world’s agriculture relies on oil and gas for fertilizers, machinery, transportation and sometimes cold storage.
Plastics aren’t even that old, it really is quite doable.
Over several decades maybe. Overnight definitely not.
There’s a multitude of issues that individual citizens have a very hard time solving or getting around.
In the majority of the US (and the world, really) people have to own cars to get from A to B in order to survive (which coincidentally means we’re spending untold billions on the infrastructure to support that habit, at the cost of the liveable environment and citizens wallets, whether they drive or not).
Changing that is an enormous undertaking that will require an equally huge societal shift. In a culture where the car is the obvious choice it is next to impossible to get citizens to see that that choice is fucking them, and I’m sure Big Oil won’t ever do anything to change that perception because it will hit their bottom line. So unless you move to a city where you can live without a car and still have the (positive) freedom to go where you need to be you will need to vote and write your congressman to make it possible for you to live without the yoke that is the car.
So yes, citizens burn gasoline because they must do so in order to afford a living. Further, as an aside, if people made the amount of money congruent with their productivity then maybe they wouldn’t have to commute so much in order to have a roof over their head and food on the table. We could relax production and increase leisure time. Maybe. I’m just some dumb cunt.
I fully agree - it is a systemic problem (which is why I’m pointing out just singling out oil companies is misguided).
But I wouldn’t go as far as making consumers simple victims of that system: we all also do choices that prioritize selfishness or instant gratification too. The number of pickup trucks in America that are used as one-person commuter is an obvious example - Americans could massively cut their gasoline consumption if they drove the same vehicles Japanese or Europeans chose. (and it’s not like those live a life of poverty and sacrifice)
You say that as if we weren’t massively subsidizing them, both directly and indirectly (e.g. by subsidizing the roads the cars that use their products drive on). You think that artificially-low price doesn’t have a massive impact on demand?
But again that’s not Exxon that is subsidizing roads or building cars, or forcing Americans to buy the biggest truck they can find. The issue is more complicated than “whoever pumps the oil out of the ground is liable for whatever happens to it afterwards”
It’s not about who’s fault it is; it’s about where to apply the policy leverage to obtain the correct behavior. I don’t give a fuck if Exxon is entirely blameless (and to be clear, they aren’t); the correct solution is still regulating Exxon.
The notion that the only way we could ever possibly consider trying to solve the problem is by cajoling the public to change their human nature, because regulating a few corporations (that only exist as a goddamn privilege in the first place, by the way!) is somehow off-limits, is 100% pro-fossil-fuel-industry disinformation.
the correct solution is still regulating Exxon
But it’s not! The correct solution is to kill the demand for oil.
It’s not Exxon that burns the oil they extract, it’s the entire economy and consumers that buy it from them. You can regulate Exxon all you want, that won’t change anything about that demand and the burning.
Edit: oof I read it completely wrong. Nothing to see here folks.
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?
I had not anticipated “Oh shit that’s a good point I should apply for a job with McKinsey” to be a takeaway that anyone would have to this post, let alone the assumed main takeaway from it.
Lol yeah I goofed pretty hard on that one
All good. I am chuffed that you were good-natured about it.
I even already had my coffee when I made the original comment. There was no excuse for my side fumbling.
We are all I this train going to hell. Might as well sit down and get comfy. Either that or get off early. But there are still a few sips of soda in the can.
We are all I this train going to hell. Might as well sit down and get comfy. Either that or get off early. But there are still a few sips of soda in the can.
If only it was a train. We’re in a conga line of SUV’s.
You’re right. It’s a traffic jam of SUVs on Highway 00 headed for Climate Apocalypse. No exits. But you can get off by going over the rails.
Brought to you by billionaires
Kinda feels like karma on a global scale. Humans evolved intelligence just to use it to systematically oppress each other, mostly in the name of feeling powerful. Not sure I’d call that “intelligence” and I think the planet would be better off without us.
The problem with that idea is us colonizers will still reap the rewards while karma exploits the less developed
The planet doesn’t give a shit about us. These are just natural processes (yes humans are a part of nature). We are just a particularly anomalous part of the system
Yeah I’ve understood since high school, what the fuck do you want me to do about it when I can barely keep myself and my family alive as is?
This particular author wants you to panic.
We are certainly facing many environmental crisis, there’s no doubt about that… But the data here seems limited. I assume we simply don’t have measurements older than 50 years to add to this graph?
Edit: Here is a better graph!
Still alarming, but the data only goes back so far… It feels like something everyone needs to pay attention to and take seriously, but perhaps turning down the Vault-Tec guy knocking at your door is still a reasonable action to take.
Seems like the authors doomerism is working. Look at some of the assholes in the comments. It feels like they get off of the negativity.
Is shit bad? Yeah. But giving up helps no one and is a punch in the face to all the people that are fighting tooth and nail every single day.
Fighting what? Who?
Fighting against conservatives, mainly.
That graph is 4 years out of date and still shows the same thing, if we don’t make radical changes, we’re fucked.
We’re fucked no matter what, but the degree of the fucking is in question still. 1.5 degrees is not great, 2.5 is really bad. 4 degrees is civilization-ending catastrophe.
And good news! We’ve probably averted 4 degrees through our actions over the last 20-40 years or so. Iirc we’re still on track for 2-3 degrees. We have more work to do.
We should start making clouds in the oceans again. I think they were protecting us.
I strongly recommend keeping this idea in your back pocket. There are a few ways to accomplish geoengineering to reduce solar gain with technology we have now. It will cost taxpayers a staggering amount of money, will likely punch down on poorer countries anyway through modified weather patterns, crop yields may suffer, air quality may get worse in ways you can’t imagine, but it will work for a limited time. Right now it’s a game of chicken where we want governments and big business to do anything else first. If we flinch and dim the skies, the petroleum industry will just burn more and faster, throwing away the time we just bought, delaying doomsday by a few decades instead.
People are already dying in “poorer” countries. We could do some clouds now to bring the temperature down to levels that aren’t killing people.
I know. I’m in my early 40ies and have been trying all my life to convince people around me and do what I could. But with time, I learned about the fraud that is plastic recycling and how capitalism is really not interested at all into solving the issue. My city is fining people for putting recyclables in the trash, but the recycling centres are full and they themselves trash the recycling. What matters is short term profits and virtue signalling. What matters is to look green. Just buy electric cars and everything will be good, apparently. Buy green! But don’t stop buying!
Then a pandemic happened and people disappointed me en masse. We could see the changes in the environment and in ways we could live, but most people were “EaGeR To GeT BaCk To ThEiR RoUtInE”, even if it meant commuting 5 days a week to the office, just to “resume” the economy. What mattered was not other people, it was the economy. Even when they forced us to stay inside with curfews, people couldn’t go out to run/walk in the evening, they barred unvaccinated people from stores (I’m vaccinated 4 times but it’s still not okay), it was all for the economy and to save the system, not the people. And if you had a minor disagreement with this, you were a grandma killer for wanting to go cycling at night. Then we went back to our routines and nothing will ever change. People are whining because of paper straws and want the plastic back. And all this straw stupidity is not even important on the grand scheme of things. Most people don’t want to change anything. Most people will not vote for change. The system does not have any incentive to change.
I never owned a car and everyone around me is telling me how great they are and how I should definitely buy one because it’s useful and practical. I would have total absolution! Some people here are vociferously fighting against active and public transit, and the government is actually cutting public transit funding. People are yelling at me when I trash some plastic instead of putting it in the recycle bin, then they drive away in their car that generates literal tons of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases in the air, accusing me of not caring.
I gave up a few years ago. We will deserve most of it.
Don’t worry, the rich will eat well and survive, with their private security forces willing to kill others, while the poor will starve and die. We’ll have rations and curfews but it will all be for the good of the
peopleeconomy. Just like in the pandemic, It will be an effort of the poor, to save the rich. That’s what we want. You just have to become rich before it happens.The bit about not being able to go outside is because people were using it as a pretext to explain why they weren’t at home… when really they were off socialising and increasing possible infection points.
It’s why they closed children’s playgrounds here in Australia, parents were using their children playing to gather around, then held empty coffee cups to explain why their masks were off. I’ve never seen so many people desperately swigging at water bottles in a supermarket in my life, or young men clutching at low dose asthma inhalers either. Somewhat amusingly, none of these behaviours have shown up since.
If people could have shown any level of responsibility… but there we have it, don’t we? They can’t see beyond the end of their own nose, and this is why we are here, finding out.
When I arrived on earth the first thing that struck me was just how fickle, shortsighted, gullible, and inconsiderate the bulk of your species is. As this planet burns your noses are stuck in phones watching YouTube shorts.
We’ve decided to leave. You’re not worth conquering and certainly not worthy of joining the stellar empire. Expect no more crop circles or foo fighters.
Your people is a beast.
The rich will live long enough to preside over a dead planet. Having billions of dollars to buy an apple is useless when there are no apples to be had for any price. They’ll die like the rest of us, just way more alone. Assuming they aren’t burned out if their bunkers along the way by starving hordes with nothing to lose.
Yes but they’ll probably stockpile enough macbooks to last a long time.
It’s not quite true. It’s very unlikely the planet will become completely inhabitable to humans anytime soon. There’s going to be a tipping point of enough extinction to completely stop any more damage and return to a balanced ecosystem. Once that happens, it’s very likely the people with the most power will be the ones in the remaining habitable zones.
Seconded. It’s so baffling to me that we have seemingly forgotten the purpose of the economy. It is supposed to be there to benefit our lives and instead it is costing us everything. Some slave away on their knees building streets and others waste the precious few laps around the sun staring at lights in a box. We have the technology to give everyone enough such that the average person would only have to work a few hours.
For a comparison in a very real sense:
Prior to the Neolithic revolution, which put an end to our nomadic past and turned our species into agriculturalists, it took more than 50 hours of labor (mostly gathering wood) to “buy” 1,000 lumen hours of light. By 1800, it took about 5.4 hours. By 1900, it took 0.22 hours. By 1992, 1,000 lumen hours required 0.00012 hours of human labor.
We’ve put the cart before the horse on an unfathomable scale. A good life for all (current humans and future) is within reach but the economic system that has created this bounty has grown out of control and serves nothing but itself anymore.
Skeezix’s Law: The purpose of the economy is to extract as much value from the populace as possible, but whatever means possible, in any way that offers an alibi.
In your grandfather’s day, choice, privacy, and leisure were humored by the economy. As the decades have passed, the economy has advanced to become a machine increasingly fine-tuned to extract value. As the world burns and resources run out, the economy attempts to adapt by strengthening its extraction methods further.
The average human sees 2000-5000 ads per day in one form or another.
It does provide some promise though because if we want to live good, peaceful, sustainable, educated lives, the technology is right there, but there is an external and only barely human force that is imposing a malignant culture on us all.
