- cross-posted to:
- science@mander.xyz
- science@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- science@mander.xyz
- science@lemmy.world
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Yay we’re all going to die of heat death
The thing that doesn’t get called out enough is that many greenhouse gasses have a lag time before they actually start causing heat. CO2 for example takes about 20 years if I recall correctly. So we are seeing the results of what was emitted years ago… not necessarily the current emissions.
Really? I’ve never heard of this, and I’m a climate scientist… Not saying it’s definitely wrong, but a citation would be good.
Not true at all. Compare:
“lag time before they actually start causing heat” and
“the timing between an emission and the maximum temperature response is a decade on average”
A “start” and a “maximum” are completely different. IR absorption starts immediately and increases over years to a maximum.
Apologies I should have linked a source in that claim. I only had a rough understanding of it and had read an article on phys.org that mentioned that previously. Arguably still a big concern since we could not be seeing the actual warming done in present day 2026 for another decade or more.
How fucked are we?
My intuitive answer is that the collapse of globalised industrial society seems fairly likely (as a result of the end of cheap liquid fuel if nothing else). What that looks like is highly dependent on how we respond - it’s not a climate problem, it’s a social problem.
I don’t think humans are going to go extinct, but a population crash seems likely. And we’re taking out a tonne of other species.
I would hazard that the the extintion of Mankind really depends on the innevitable water and food wars escalating out of control in the nuclear era or not.
A lot of this shit (you also see it in Economics, as Inequality explodes and Social Mobility grinds to a halt) can escalate out of control via the reactions of Human Societies to it (just look at the rise of the Far Right in response to the above mentioned trends in Inequality and Social Mobility).
As I see it, people’s and countries’ reaction to the problems caused by Climate Change are were the nastiest of nasty shit can come out from.
Yep, plausible, but again, that’s a social problem. It’s super interesting, but not something a climate scientist can really speak to.
I would say that the ultimate impact on Mankind of Climate Change is itself outside the scope of Climatology by itself - by its own nature it would be an interdisciplinary effort involving at the very least Climatologists, Sociologists and Economists.
That said, anybody can, as non-expert, mention some possibilities, though obviously not claiming any authoritativeness on the subject. (That’s what I tried to do, hence why I began by saying it was just my “hazarding”).
Yep, agree! That first paragraph is where I’m at now, trying to work with social scientists, business people, economists, who ever is keen. That interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary work is suuuuper interesting and fun and fucking hard.
Also I’m just opinionated in general, you know? 😅
Well greenhouse gases are often described as a blanket and a blanket doesn’t immediately get warm, it take time. I doubt the trickling effect is much different in lag time than sudden pulses, its just gradually increasing the blanket rather than pulling it all on at once. Its still gonna take time for more solar energy to accumulate by bouncing off the trickling in CO2.
In the book plows, plagues, and petroleum, the author uses several factors of humans history to argue that man made climate change was slowly having an impact much before the industrial revolution, which is the common “starting point” for most people and scientists. Althought not as drastic as this sudden increase in fossil fuel burning, they argue that impacts such as deforestion and burning of cropland in early human settlements had a measureable impact on carbon sinks and carbon releases, still enough to start skewing the natural rate of climate change.
Yeah… realising I was not making a distinction between greenhouse effect (e.g. increased rate of warming), and the result (e.g. actual increased heat content/temperature. I think the rate of warming increase is basically instant, but yes, it takes some time for the temperature levels to catch up.
I don’t know if I was explicitly taught it at uni, buy I have always understood as a climate scientist that GHG emissions started before the industrial revolution (albeit small). I think that’s common knowledge in climate science.
They may be thinking of the half-life of C02, around 120 years … or the delayed effect of temperature uptake by the ocean. I’m not a clime scientist.
I edited in a reference - it’s a thing aparently
Removed by mod
During the late 1970’s, ExxonMobil scientists predicted global warming would accelerate with use of fossil fuels. They were shockingly accurate and the f’ed up weather patterns are the result. Keep buying and driving gas guzzlers.
Finally, some good news.
This is either sarcasm or deep, distressing cynicism. Even though I wrote it, I’m not sure which it is.
Sarcasm. Cynicism is the attitude that all people are driven by selfishness. Which is true, but not related to your statement.
As a fan of Diogenes, I feel obliged to point out that Cynicism is not the same as pessimism. Cynicism is the philosophical belief that society/civilization was a mistake and that humans would be best advised to follow the example of dogs, who are (generally) innately happy creatures who don’t worry about pointless abstract things like real estate ownership and licensing agreements.
Okay, I can pivot to following the example of dogs.
I’m going to sniff your butt now.
I’m sure it has nothing to do with the billionaire pedophiles not giving a fuck.
Of course not. It’s not enough people recycling their grocery bags.
Not to say you shouldn’t recycle.
Of course not. But it does feel a little silly when there are town-sized data centres being built in every direction and billionaires are just “choosing” to break all laws. Meta’s got gas turbines running to power theirs and they just said they’re gonna do it for another year. Who’s gonna stop ‘em? Everyone is too busy working and trying to survive to stop them from pretty literally torching our futures and especially our children’s futures.
Things will need to get pretty bad before we see any kind of justice or change of direction, I fear ☹️
Everybody should know where the data centre nearest them is, along with a plan to get there really fast.
Unfortunately we’ve been duped, a lot of it sadly ends up in landfills.
In some less advanced countries, like the United States of America.
Yeah, I’ve become something of a refuse-police everywhere I go.
It pisses me off that you can just put whatever in the bin and it gets disappeared and you’ve done a great job caring for the planet.
Most of it is just plain not recyclable. Never was. Some can theoretically be downcycled into expensive ugly park benches that no one wants so no one bothers to do that. Only PET can be “re” cycled, but plenty isn’t.
Glass and metals are recycled pretty frequently, but yeah pretty much everything is just garbage
Billionaires do give a fuck. They just don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves, and maybe close family/friends to some extent.
If I were to hazard a guess I’d guess billionaires fall into 3 camps regarding climate change. Those that still don’t believe in it or that their will be any consequences. They are probably in the minority of billionaires (I do believe most of them believe climate change is real at this point, but their unbridled greed won’t allow them to admit it in public).
Then you’ve got the billionaires who do believe in climate change split into 2 more camps. Those that are so old that they predict they won’t live long enough to see the large scale consequences effect them, and thus don’t care. Finally, those that are young, but believe they can save themselves, without having to help save the world. Those are the billionaires building underground bunkers and compounds. Planning to ride it out from their private utopias.
That’s my bad…I was super gassy the other week. I’ll back on the beans and onions.
Nice knowing, y’all. Smoke em if you got em.
Crypto farming, feeding the ai bubble, large scale wars of aggression, commuters replacing cars with trucks, buying throwaway junk has never been easier. That’s the relatively new completely unnecessary hubris that I can think off atm. These should be the low hanging fruits to just not do, but apparently we’re going to continue doing them anyways. If we can’t address the low hanging fruits, then tackling the harder challenges will remain a pipe dream until it’s too late. Climate stability is fucked, and we’re in for a rough ride.
We can’t even stop a rise in fascism, an incredibly stupid thing, across the globe. We don’t stand a chance against global warming. We’re cooked.
we can’t even stop a rise in fascism because we lack the tools to do so, most importantly we lack the tool of understanding. we don’t even understand what fascism is or why people follow it, thus we stand no chance of tackling the problem at its root. if you really want to combat fascism, you have to understand it first.
We’ve done more in the last five years to curb fossil fuel consumption than at an point in human history.
From a massive pivot to renewable energy to our Green-Centric foreign policy of blowing up Nordstrem II, embargoing Venezuela, and shutting down the Straight of Hormuz, we are absolutely turning a corner on future fossil fuel consumption.
Donald Trump may go down in history as the most climate friendly leader in our generation. A hundred thousand Greenpeace activists could not have achieved in their lifetime what he’s done in less than two terms as president.
Hilariously, you are right. It certainly wasn’t his intention to do so, but it is happening. Strangely aligned with China spending like crazy to pivot to a green energy super-supplier. End of an era, although no one will admit it yet.
Fossil fuel consumption hasn’t actually gone down. All the renewable sources have come on top of energy from nonrenewable ones
Unfortunately, we have to wait until we have fed enough training data into the slop machines until we can do anything about it, because humans are way too stupid to do it, and even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t be futuristic enough.
funny thing is the “ai” already gave us answers - which are known from years, thanks to scientists - but people do not want to listen.
Meanwhile, my workplace just announced RTO, starting next year. It’s a moderately large, 100% white collar office site.
Gotta drive those CO2 numbers up, baby!If the billionaire cult conterences shifted from “debunking global warming” to “adapting to global warming”.
We tried capitalism in a hundred different ways and we are all out of ideas.
I wish we had tried it in a hundred ways. Best we can do is try it in two ways: monopoly consolidation, followed by oligarchy
If we’re good little consumers we can have some trickle down crony capitalism for dessert.
