Everything is fine, the earth simply won’t be habitable for humans. The Earth will spin on without us when we inevitably allow industry to destroy humanity by making earth uninhabitable by human life.
It’s what we deserve for being so stupid as to see this happening and doing nothing about it to stop it or slow it down. There’s plenty of climate change advocates which are almost always drowned out by the chorus of companies and climate deniers who believe propaganda over science.
What people deserve, and what’s going to happen to them are not mutually inclusive.
I’m also going to state that IMO, it’s not just a few corrupt men. There’s lots of them… Lots and lots of them… Not the majority by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly more than a few
You make it sound like humans are the only ones affected by climate change. Sea turtles, elephants, polar bears, pandas, there’s a fuck load of animals we’re directly killing off. Everything is most certainly not fine, even if you don’t give a single shit about innocent human lives.
I remember when I passed my test the mid 00’s if I did a long motorway journey my bumper and windscreen would be an insect graveyard… now it’s next to nothing.
We will take a large chunk of the planets life with us. I don’t think we can destroy it all however, the planet will get to intelligent life eventually.
No. That’s simplistic and wrong. Huge swaths of the planet will remain nicely habitable. But large swaths won’t, and disease increase and economic failures will make things very terrible.
But this “all gonna die” stuff is dumb and wrong. Sorry.
It won’t matter if a small area is still habitable. The resolution of 7 billion people trying to fit into a space that fits a fraction of the population will end the species.
It took less than 1% of the population of Europe moving around to nearly break the EU. Watch what happens when it’s 10 to 20% of everyone everywhere.
The movement of a tiny group of people relative to the size of the EU drastically shifted the entire political structure of the EU, leading to Brexit and several other countries considering the same. Magnify that affect by the number of people that will be moving due to climate change, and you get an extinction event.
Will end the current age of civilization? Most definitely.
Will it end organized societies as we know them? Probably?
Will the human beings go extinct? Probably not. Its not crazy to think that we’d face a bottleneck of only a few hundred million humans or less. But there are people all across the economic and geographic spectrum who are prepping. The rich will survive at their polar fortresses. The poorer will survive underground, or at high altitudes.
Let’s be honest, this will end up with only the ultra-rich surviving in the last few strips of livable surface of the planet - and them elated to have finally “culled the undeserving” as they have been hoping for for millennia.
That’s why the concept of artificial intelligence is so appealing to them - having a compilation of all human knowledge, without actually having to deal with humans claiming “nonsense” like human rights and a livable wage.
Then “what to do, when the motor makes this sound” becomes “what to do when the LLM tells me to eat my children and water the plants with gettorade because it got electrolytes”
that’s funny, because if they rely on AI to serve them, they will the first ones to be screwed. the most replaceable human class in the History is not plebs, but tyrants. they are the least prepared, the least talented, the least creative, the least reliable, the least resourceful, and finally, the least willing to contribute something to any compilation. so let them have fun while they can.
Look at previous violent revolutions and see who died and who lived. I wouldn’t bet on the ultra-rich, there are simple more of the rest but a new elite will rule, just like the old one.
There is one massive difference between former violent revolutions and the current ones - the ultra-rich of last century still had to rely on appeasing the military to do their bidding, but the ultra-rich of today now have access to automated weapons of mass destruction at the reach of their fingertips. If they feel like it, they can nuke the planet as a last-resort measure, while they’re sipping their champagne in a self-sustainable complex in the middle of nowhere.
As if they can produce champagne and other stuff out of nowhere. They may have a nuclear fallout bunker somewhere hidden in a desert but they can only rely on existing food / materials they can accumulate now. Most likely cans of food. Their champagne bottle will run dry unless they’re hiding in a massive Amazon underground warehouse that no one can access it. After all we have seen the riots in Paris, riots in Hongkong, if the law enforcement is not strong enough, people will automatically go riot mode, and if there is really a large conflict, there will be no one protecting the wealthy ones property and everyone is going for themselves
access to automated weapons of mass destruction at the reach of their fingertips
They don’t. WMDs are far from automated, they require multiple human steps to get deployed, and each one of those can say “no” at any time (then possibly get court martialed, but the WMD stays undeployed).
What’s more threatening, is having those ultra-rich promise everyone in the chain of command (and their families) a place at their self-sustainable complex.
Nah, the rich will be eaten. Since their power completely relies on society. Taliban in the Mountains of Afghanistan will be fine and will be fighting off a alien occupation in 1000 years.
Funny you say that considering anyone earning more than 40k USD yearly is part of the 2.6 percentile of the richest population GLOBALLY.
Seeing as 90% of us in south America earn even less than half of that, I’d suggest y’all prepare to be eaten by the starving poor masses of the global south
Ecosystems there won’t necessarily fare all too well. Trees are drying up because they aren’t used to that dryness/heat. New trees will take time to grow and they don’t necessarily support the same species.
The mix of species you used to have that lived in a balanced way is being disturbed by various invasive species.
I’m not saying those ecosystems will necessarily collapse, but there is a nonzero risk that they might.
Tundras aren’t going to be all that liveable just because the temperature is a bit nicer. They’ll still get very dark in the winter. Like 24-hour darkness, in some of it. Some people thrive, some people cope, some people go batshit crazy when daylight hours drop below about 4 hours a day.
That’s actually the easy part. Most tundra is sitting on top of permafrost. I worked on low latitude tundra for one summer and if my experience there is representative, melting permafrost is going to turn a lot of tundra into swampland for a long time.
Even if I’m wrong about the tundra turning into swampland, there isn’t really all that much room. Good luck cramming a few billion people above 55 or 60 degrees latitude.
The tree line is moving pole-wards thanks to global warming; the gain is less than what’s lost by the desert line moving pole-wards, but it’s something.
Good luck cramming a few billion people above 55 or 60 degrees latitude
Realistically, you need less than 1m² of terrain per person if you stack them in high enough buildings. Look at how China is doing it.
I’m glad I’m old enough to not have to consider living at the population density you suggest. I find the population density of Saskatchewan to be quite enough. I lived in a small city (Saskatoon) for 40 years and the last 10 were flat out miserable. The first 30 were tolerable only because we escaped to nature every weekend.
I’d imagine places like Svalbard. Technically it’s inhabitable now, and has been for decades but it’s the most Northern year round sustained population on the globe.
Further North is Arctic tundra and there isn’t a sustained population. Maybe he’s referring to areas like that.
Though I will say that back in 2019 I saw an article about how every winter a bunch of Reindeer in Svalbard die due to climate change. As the spring rolls in and snow melts, Reindeer corpses are left behind in the fields 🥺.
The entire world is heating. The artic/antarctic doesn’t have the landmass to sustain population. Everywhere else is already either habitable now but won’t be soon or already too hot to be habitable.
Any billionaire would be smart to build a massive self-sufficient compound (complete with temperature-regulated indoor farms, solar panels/wind turbines, huge stockpiles of supplies, firearms and a loyal crew of mercenaries or some armed drones to defend from intruders), because I really do think that we are gonna have to adopt the prepper mentality within the next few decades.
We mocked people for prepping for nuclear war, zombie apocalypses and raptures, but soon we are going to see the climate well and truly turn against us.
Sort of like how being rich didn’t matter when the Roman empire collapsed?
Oh wait we were left with kings and peasants, and far worse wealth inequality than there was before, and there was almost a thousand years of that before humanity started making progress again. Those were called the Dark Ages.
Anyone trying to say the rich won’t survive is completely ignorant of history.
Well, it might not be the same rich, but someone will be rich and, by definition, will have the means to live. Your right, but its kind of an always true statement. The wealthy ppl of Rome certainly did not fair well in the collapse of Rome and power moved to new places in that time.
Climate collapse will make it more important to be able to move food around the world. The effect will be to strengthen hierarchies capable of managing global-scale food enterprises. The result will be a hyper-wealthy class that transports food, sustains local farmers via trade, and suppresses them to keep power. Farming will be what everyone does, and it will be essential to keep them doing it as yields will plummet.
Because they’re causing this shit for decades now, solely because of their greed. If most of them suddenly have a change of heart and decide to put their power to help the world then opinions about them will improve, until then it’s pretty justifiable to want to lynch those responsible one by one like the unhinged murderers they are.
Did the wealthiest take responsibility? No, they used their wealth and power to sell off the future of the entire planet for a tiny bit of personal instant gratification.
I’ve been campaigning about climate change since I learned about it, all told over thirty years, and those bastards have been gutting the planet the whole time. I’m wholly in favour of the any means necessary approach
More like over 200 years ago. There was a french female scientist that discovered the greenhouse effect before John Tyndall but I forgot her name and I’m at work rn, can’t search for it.
It was an American named Eunice Foote that detailed the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, but, give or take, it was also around the same time that many scientists came to the same or similar conclusions about this subject. So yes, we’ve been warned for over 200 years and have done exactly nothing to solve the problem. Why? $.
Yeah they were predicting an ice age. And technically we’re still in an ice age, so the planet has to get warmer to reach it’s natural balance point. But it could also get cooler, because we’re in an interglacial period. If we don’t want continental glaciation maybe we should be thankful that the planet’s warming and not cooling.
That’s a myth perpetuated by oil companies to discredit climate science. There was a single paper about it that was widely rejected as a crackpot theory by the larger scientific community. The consensus then was the same as it is now.
Yes, we are in an ice age, seeing as there are frozen poles. But we are changing that, soon there will be no frozen pole caps and with that, the ice age will have ended. We are creating our own hot period.
Btw. it can only be an interglacial period if the glaciers return after. It’s a descriptive term, not a prescriptive, and there is no reason why the current warm period should be seen as interglacial.
Because climate doesn’t just change without a cause, it needs a driving force. Earlier hot periods were caused by volcanic CO2 and the change happened slowly, over millions of years. Earlier cold periods had a number of different reasons, from nuclear winters after asteroid impact, ultra-high plant growth with not enough O2 consumers or global darkening due to the ash of a supervolcano or even the changing tilt of earths axis.
There is no natural reason for the current warm period to turn into continental glaciation, let alone end so early and so fast, let alone the entire ice age, that has created temperatures that humans are comfortable with, just melting away around us. We have likely ended the ice age entirely, as much heat as we trapped in the atmosphere.
Climate changes more rapidly right now than it ever did before bar the impact of ecocidal asteroids and the consequences are dire. We are heating up the planet and there is no force cooling it. If we want to stay even a little bit comfortable, we should drastically reduce the amount of energy trapped in our atmosphere.
We usually do not have AC here (for example in Germany). Not even in hospitals, schools, elderly care, etc. The solution of our government, after many people already died because of heat, is to make shelter rooms somewhere in the city where you can go when it’s getting too hot. That’s how “prepared” we are.
Also, the majority of people here do not own a home but instead are dependable on their landlord to do something against the heat. Which is obviously not happening. So instead those people who have the money for it start buying free standing AC units. Which need a pipe to hang out of the window and are highly inefficient.
Yeah, that’s what I figured. I’d heard that a lot of europe lacks warm weather infrastructure and most homes lack the basic air conditioning that is ubiquitous here in the US. I don’t see a lot of fixes for that.
Sure if you never plan to leave the house this is fine. The energy for all those ac have to come from somewhere so let’s burn some more CO2, I’m sure that won’t make it worse.
Use an evaporative cooler! All you do is chuck ice in it. Cheaper to run, easier to recycle and arguably more effective for small home/apartment living.
I actually appreciate the simple guide on how to convert celsius to freedom units. I guess to convert F to C, we’d do the opposite (subtract 32, add 10%, then halve.)
We've been 37 or 38 in my area of Tokyo off and on the past couple of weeks. It will only get warmer. The bad part is that it's still rainy season so we also get stupid humidity to go with it. It's 27 in my office, but we have at least one of our aircon units running nearly 24/7 on the "dry" setting to attempt to pull some of the heat and humidity out.
Oh they are switching from “Its not real” to “its all over, we can’t do anything, so invest in fossils even more” (the invest part is an exaggeration). I want to believe that most of those messages are from paid actors (oil industry, authoritarian regimes).
It’s not simply a climate change. It’s a coined term by the fossil fuel industry. Like BP introduced the individual carbon footprint, this one should also be ignored. It’s a climate crisis.
Calling it climate change implies it is of natural change. It belittles the criticality of the human induced influence. The fossil fuel industry knows exactly why they are calling it climate change and not climate crisis. Global warming is also, as much as climate change, scientifically correct, but let’s be honest. Since when does the industry care about scientifical facts? They use that in ill faith.
It’s called climate change because it’s more than global warming. A lot of things are changing, and they’re all bad. To just say global warming would be ignoring all of the other problems.
I agree. Global warming is one aspect of many of our current climate crisis. And it will become worse when politics won’t restrict the reign of fossil fuel industries.
I seem to have issues trying to convey my intention when I am highlighting why these industries use the term climate change now. I try it once more.
‘Climate is changing. It is something that has always happened. It’s natural. Climate change is completely normal.’ That is the implied meaning, especially by fossil fuel industries, which more than often try to shift the blame away from them by either making it a personal issue (carbon footprint) or describing it as a natural occurance. Intentionally ignoring their influence by burning resources and releasing damaging gases, raising temperatures, melting ice, damaging the saline conveyor belt.
Personally I think it’s far too late. I’m not having children and my friends and family who do are scared; here in Australia there’s no where to go to escape the heat. We will all die here
You know, in many parts of the world dying from decapitation is much more probable. Or just, eh, rapid lead poisoning combined with mechanical damage to your internal organs.
First world panic is something else really. Humans can live in orbit and on Mars FFS. Cooling the living spaces is not an unsolvable problem even in Australia.
Scientists: The average temperature across the world is rapidly approaching the point of no return on the planet becoming uninhabitable and we have no feasible way to avoid it.
I’m mostly talking about the panicking tone of that comment.
Also about feasible ways - the goal is to find an economically feasible replacement for the processes leading to such emissions. Or create an ecofascist world government which will force everyone to behave.
The average of those two is not a goal, as it doesn’t solve the problem.
So - either we make it cheaper and easier for people in Equatorial Africa, Afghanistan etc to use “green” technologies, or we are fucked, unless conquering the whole planet is back on the menu.
Perhaps “feasible” wasn’t the word I was looking for so much as “realistic.” It’s going to be an uphill battle convincing profit-based companies to produce a cheap, green alternative but I’d love to be proven wrong. Short of fascism I do think government nudging of the market through grants etc is something we sorely need to get moving on, because money is the only thing that speaks to these giant faceless corporations.
I’d personally just like some weakening of patent, IP, trademark etc laws. We are at a point when these work for companies too big to not be malicious.
Anyway, the cheap green alternative is called a nuclear reactor. I’ve read there are some smaller, more compact models in testing.
It´s called climate change and this is just the beginning. Scientists have warned us for decades now but humanity chose to ignore that until it was too late. Now you can see the consequences of that fatal ignorance. Humanity is fucked thanks to the greedy people who own the industry and the corrupt politicians who never properly regulated them. Enjoy!
I mean, not as if 40C was unheard of in the Mediterranean?..
Climate change is real, but not sure how useful is thinking about it without carefully measuring your options.
When you pay more for a green alternative to something very much not green, you may be causing lots of bad things indirectly.
I mean, if a thing itself is 100% green energy\resource\process, then money you pay for it are maybe 20% green and 80% pretty much brown. So if it costs twice and you pay for that, you may be creating a demand for dirtier production just to soothe your conscience about global warming.
In my case I’m using it as a hyperbolic simile to indicate that your “shouldn’t use green stuff because some might use brown stuff to make it” argument is simplistic to the point of being primitive and regressive.
It relies on a false assumption that progress can’t be achieved because anything that’s good for the planet is created by processes much worse than what’s currently destroying the planet.
What matters is how much brown stuff you spend total. So if you directly spend less brown stuff, replacing it with green stuff, but indirectly more brown stuff, then you are making things worse. Because the goal is a good total of carbon emissions or whatever else for the whole planet, not just for your own western country where the dirtier parts may not be done.
Your argument is clear. There’s an opportunity cost to Green.
What you’re missing is the momentum of green. A single solar panel in a sea of coal power plants is certainly dirtier than coal in the short term. For the exact reasons you outlined.
But you have 2 flaws in your logic.
we aren’t in that situation right now and I’d like to understand why you think we are. As we become more green then green things result in less brown, so there’s a snowball effect you’re ignoring here. Furthermore that snowball effect has already begun!
Renewable energy, like panels, result in brown during manufacturing and installation. Once they’re up they generate power for, on average, 25 years. The electricity-per-co2-ton is better than coal over 25 years.
I mean, not as if 40C was unheard of in the Mediterranean?..
Record breaking temperatures are by definition unheard of. What the Mediterranean is experiencing is not normal by any definition.
When you pay more for a green alternative to something very much not green, you may be causing lots of bad things indirectly.
The not green versions are also costing us by costing the environment.
I mean, if a thing itself is 100% green energy\resource\process, then money you pay for it are maybe 20% green and 80% pretty much brown. So if it costs twice and you pay for that, you may be creating a demand for dirtier production just to soothe your conscience about global warming.
This makes absolutely not sense at all. You have absolutely no evidence or data to back up these numbers you made up. You’ve essentially made a bunch of false assumptions and then used those false assumptions to then validate your inaccurate claim.
Record breaking temperatures are by definition unheard of. What the Mediterranean is experiencing is not normal by any definition.
Record breaking temperatures do not account for anything before records start. Obviously.
You have absolutely no evidence or data to back up these numbers you made up.
There are no numbers in my comment which should be backed up by evidence. These are an example.
It’s just that if you explain things as they are, nobody understands you, and if you simplify (by providing such made up analogies and examples), those same people (like you) act snobbish (while you personally really shouldn’t).
You’ve essentially made a bunch of false assumptions and then used those false assumptions to then validate your inaccurate claim.
What I’ve used is called conditional logic mostly.
About the rest - I do realize that connecting money (as the universal equivalent) to energy and energy (from all sources) to pollution may be too complex for you.
Record breaking temperatures do not account for anything before records start. Obviously.
Firstly setting new records repeatedly for records that have existed for a 100+ years is still extremely concerning. I don’t know how you think this is actually somehow a rebuttal of what I said. Additionally we have average temperature and environmental conditions going back millions of years through ice core and geologic records.
There are no numbers in my comment which should be backed up by evidence. These are an example.
80% and 20% are numbers. My point is your “example” is made up and hence meaningless. It’s as meaningful as me giving you an example where all work that is dont to pay for that additional cost is done through green means.
What I’ve used is called conditional logic mostly.
What you’ve done is not understand how conditional logic works as your IF/THEN conditional statement is not based on reality and is speaking purely hypothetically. I agree that in your made up reality that doesn’t exist, this made up condition would not be reasonable.
About the rest - I do realize that connecting money (as the universal equivalent) to energy and energy (from all sources) to pollution may be too complex for you.
Apparently the whole concept of reading may be too complex for you as you clearly seem to lack the ability to comprehend what you’ve read. Dirty solutions have environmental impact that ultimately has a monetary cost to mitigate. Just because you don’t pay for it at purchase does not mean there is not a monetary cost.
Firstly setting new records repeatedly for records that have existed for a 100+ years is still extremely concerning.
Of course. So what?
I don’t know how you think this is actually somehow a rebuttal of what I said.
Not a rebuttal, just a response.
My point is your “example” is made up and hence meaningless.
I could have used p and (1-p) with p between 0.1 and 0.9. Still wouldn’t be meaningless.
It’s as meaningful as me giving you an example where all work that is dont to pay for that additional cost is done through green means.
It would be wrong and the example where most of the work is done through “brown” means wouldn’t be. For my example I don’t need anything more specific.
Internet pseudointellectualism is so cute.
What you’ve done is not understand how conditional logic works
I’m sure I know how things to which I refer work sufficiently for this kind of conversation, to some extent I just like allowing the opponent to present all the fallacies they’d like while seeming rhetorically all right. It indicates whether they are arguing in good faith.
If somebody is arguing in good faith, they’ll make an effort to extract something they agree with from the opponent, and make assumptions in favor of that opponent in unclear cases, otherwise the usual.
is not based on reality
So in reality most of the production backing your money as its accepted equivalent is being done by green means?
Dirty solutions have environmental impact that ultimately has a monetary cost to mitigate. Just because you don’t pay for it at purchase does not mean there is not a monetary cost.
The burden of proof that this cost is bigger than the indirect cost I’m talking about is on you. Since I’ve said only that it may or may not justify particular green means, and you were arguing with that. Apparently that anything green is always better? I don’t know what you were trying to say.
Finally instead of glueing together entities you don’t understand in text, as neural nets may do, you use the only argument available to your kind. I’m satisfied by this conversation finally.
In North Carolina, we had a “winter that wasn’t” and now we have a summer of “surface of the sun” heat. Triple digit heat index every day last week. Good luck getting the locals to admit that climate change is real though. At this point I think some of them are actually starting to see the truth, but it just pisses them off and they dig in to denial even harder, because if there’s one thing they can’t do it’s admit they were wrong.
When I mentioned the hot weather forecast to my super libertarian crazy father in law, he was went off on a tangent on how the government is controlling the weather and causing all of this on purpose 🤦
I had to stop going to my favorite Saturday morning breakfast restaurant for pretty much the same reason. They were ranting about how all the wildfires up here were lit by the government in order to put out enough smoke to block out the sun so our crops would fail. Then everyone would rely on the government for food and they could purge the people they didn’t want around.
Ahh, I see. Interesting read/study. I wouldn’t say they call it the Faustian bargain, but an example of a Faustian bargain. I suppose they could call it the Faustian bargain of GHG reduction, so that it doesn’t usurp the term entirely, haha.
(Also I was referencing lyrics from the captain planet theme :P)
Bjørn Samset of the University of Oslo and his colleagues used four climate models, which cover a range of climate sensitivities, to see what would happen to the global average temperature if the short-lived greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide etc) were kept at their current level, but CO2 emissions ceased once they have reached a level of 420 parts per million (ppm). (This is 15 ppm above the current level of 405 ppm, or just another five years of emissions at the current rate.)
The result was average warming of 1.35°C over the four models, above a late 19th century baseline. (It has been demonstrated that global average temperatures increase while CO2 is increasing, and then remain approximately constant until the end of the millennium despite zero further emissions.)
You know, when I was a kid, I kind of had this thought that maybe nobody was doing anything because there was nothing to be done. I was wrong on that, and it would still be unequivocally better the sooner we do this. But I wasn't entirely wrong, and here we are. If we stopped yesterday, this shit would last into the next millennium!?
If nothing else, at least it made me very conscious of enjoying everything I had.
That’s what I really disliked about what reddit had become. A post with 500+ comments and having to scroll through the same fucking comment over and over again because everyone thinks they’re so fucking clever but didn’t bother to read any of the comments and see that a dozen other schmucks have made the exact same comment.
To what end? You think a user comment on Lemmy is going to change emissions policies? Direct your ire somewhere it might actually make a single bit of difference instead of just perpetuating the infighting that gets nothing done. If you’re going to waste your time on the subject, spend your thumb-taps on an email to your congressman instead.
It’s not like posting anything meaningful here will change anything. The fuckheads that put the world in this situation laugh at our faces and of anyone who tries to undo their shit. They have money, what are we going to do? Sue them? They’ll buy every lawyer everywhere. Ask for political reforms? Yeah, maybe in 2050 something might pass. Picket outside the companies? Gee, that worked so well with Occupy Wall Street, didn’t it?
You realize there’s only two ways this is going to be dealt with, right? One, we have to murder the rich assholes who invested in fossil fuel production. Two, everyone needs to be able to migrate everywhere; climate migration is going to have to be embraced, even if it means a bunch of selfish bastard conservatives don’t like the economic fallout. But no, that’s not good enough for any of you to look at and say “okay, we have a chance to make the most of this”.
My childhood in the late 90s and early 00s was STOLEN from me by government cronies who literally ripped me away from my family for several years. I lived in BC, Canada. I was BORN here in Canada and my dad and grandfather were as well. There’s no reason I alone shouldn’t have gotten to enjoy that period, playing Pokemon and Neopets in my parent’s home.
But no. Thanks a lot to all you fuckers, the economic golden age that has existed since the 50s is gone forever and I’ll never live to see anything remotely as optimistic. I hate all of you and if this whole damn planet doesn’t choke on you not giving up just a bit of comfort so people less fortunate than you don’t have to struggle just to make ends meet, I will literally start setting oil refineries on fire. GO FUCKING DIE, EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU.
Yes, we. While some are of the impression, that climate change is only because of a select few, it’s because every single one of us consumers is to blame as well.
We have the option to buy climate friendly stuff, lots of times it’s just more expensive or maybe a little bit inconvenient. Also, why does one need the next new iPhone after owning the last one for just over a year? Why do we have to eat Avocados in some cases a few times a day, that are shipped around the world and need heaps of water to grow? Same as Bananas or Strawberries in Winter…the list is very long. Same as plastic free vegetables - “the cucumber has a brown spot? Nope, not getting that, I demand it’s spotless!” So companies wrap them in plastic.
If there’s demand, companies will fulfill that demand, if there’s no demand, companies stop doing that shit, because it doesn’t make any money. Every single one of us is responsible in some way or another, even if the percentage is very miniscule.
I just wanted to say, this is a very good comment.
When people say it’s not “we” and it’s just a few people, or just companies, it always seems to me that they are - consciously or subconsciously - just making excuses for not having to actually do anything and hoping someone else will solve the problem for them. They want the problem to be solved, while not having to do anything or change their lifestyle.
There are some very obvious and clear examples of this; here’s two of them:
Studies have shown most people are in favour of carbon taxes. But with carbon taxes, companies would just shift the extra cost onto the consumers by increasing prices. One thing affected by carbon tax, would be the price of gas itself. And when prices (especially gas prices) increase, that usually results in a lot of anger and protests. So why would any democratically elected politician ever implement a carbon tax? If they did, they would be voted out, and the next one to come in would just undo it.
Another obvious example, is meat. We know one of the major protagonists in CO2 emissions is animal farming. Red meat especially is responsible for a huge source of those emissions. And yet most people don’t even wanna think about eating less meat, and they will still crack jokes about vegans and look at them sideways. And as for regulations regarding meat, the example from before still applies.
As you seem to be implying, what really needs to happen is a whole cultural shift. Trying to shift blame onto to a few people and hope they get the guillotine, won’t change anything as long as people keep demanding all the same things because then someone else will come in to fulfil that demand. Whether we like it or not, we have to accept that it’s the sum of all our actions that will determine the future, and our actions can influence other people’s actions; therefore, one way or another, we are all responsible.
Sorry for typing some much at you since you’re basically making the same point already, but I just felt like adding on.
To add to this, a simple example: Carbon Taxes are unavoidable. However, i wish people would stop arguing about what’s better (EVs or Synthetic Fuels), because in the end, both have their use cases. It’s a bit like iOS or Android. iOS and Android are very different, but also quite similar. I’m a HUGE petrol head and fossile fuels have to die as soon as possible and most governments around the world go about it completely wrong - i want to pay 2,50 Euro per Liter for 100% carbon neutral fuel, but i can’t because no country around the world actually does this properly (except maybe Sweden with HVO Diesel)
Meat has to get simply more expensive and the market will regulate that - which is also going to happen with carbon taxes, but it’s relatively slow.
I wouldn’t just put this on those generations, Exxon and the oil industry and their government dogs and very wealthy and powerful people and their minions are who deserves the most of the blame, the rest of us were powerless to stop it or brainwashed by the propaganda and disinformation being produced by the oil industry and their many allies, like Kenneth Hamm and the Young Earth Creationist movement, the American GOP, the British Tory’s, Putin’s Ruzzia, The Gulf states, and so many more.
This is fine, we just need to switch from plastic bugs and make caps attached to bottles and everything will be alright! Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)
I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It's not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it's fun. They're doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper. And given that that is very rarely the case, we have to look at things like carbon taxes to actually price in the externalities of climate damage. But that is going to increase the prices of some goods, and that requires a level of political will that has proven very difficult to come by. "Just make corporations pay" to fix things, whether that's a carbon tax or taxes on oil company executive pay or dividends or whatever else the proposal may be is always going to mean "increase prices to compensate for climate-related externalities".
That doesn't necessarily mean that all costs of addressing climate change must directly fall on consumers; government subsidies to reduce the costs of environmentally sustainable practices can also be extremely beneficial. But ultimately, this is a problem that we've all created, and we're all going to have to be part of solving it. Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn't actually get us any closer to solving things.
It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun.
I think we can agree on that corporations are aimed at cheapest way to produce most popular goods at the biggest scale they can achieve for, in the end, produce the biggest possible profit. Thats what corporations are made for: money.
In the end, rich guy gets a yacht, bunker for apocalypse and private residence with AC, private kitchen stuff and anything they want so he will be fine even if its 60C outside. If it will get unbearable, they’ll move to something like Norway and will be fine.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people who live in hot countries will die and millions will be climate refugees.
All that, because producing iphone with coal electricity (simplification, albeit I feel like its close to truth) is 10$ cheaper.
Blaming corporations, even if partially accurate, doesn’t actually get us any closer to solving things.
Swapping to paper bags will not help either. There are only two options to solve the issue:
Government forces corpo to stop wasting our planet (because we don’t have a spare one)
People get torches
1 is impossible because gov will never cut the feeding hand and 2 is just a matter of time until we will get couple hundred millions migrants from Aftica, India, Pakistan etc.
1 is still possible. But, we’re at a tipping point between ending up in some Cyberpunk corporate-ran dystopia and one where the general public actually has the upper-hand and can fend off governmental corruption.
but the thing about voting is that basically every politician is either:
In the pocket of one or more corporations
Literally part of a corporation (or outright owns one)
A politician at who doesn’t have as much power as the former two or is in the pocket of one of them
so we could vote for John StopClimateChange, and then find out that every single thing that Mr. StopClimateChange said about his crusade to stopping climate change was not at all true or was so utterly miniscule in the long run as to be meaningless
This is a defeatist and authoritarian position that the rich and powerful want you to have. They want to feel like you can’t win, so that they vote behind you while you sit at home. Until eventually, they just dismantle democracy altogether and we go back to fiefdoms.
There is clearly one party that is more in line with the goals of fighting climate change than the other. Vote for that group. Vote for that group twice a year.
Yes and No. Yes, it’s not only corporations and we must act ourselves.
No, it’s the rules that set the game. Corporations play within the rules. Politics is owning and can change the rules. The society and corporations will follow accordingly. If we really want to change we can. Look what happened during Covid. In retrospect, some insane rules (eg Germany kids not allowed to enter playgrounds. Kids couldn’t play to save the elderly). However, society obeyed to those rules.
It’s not us, it’s the rules that must change. In my view this should be the priority.
At least here in Australia parents were using the kids at the playground to socialise (standing right up in each other’s space, holding empty coffee cups to justify no mask), and so there were multiple vectors of infection. That and multigenerational households are more common in some parts of the world, so if the kid brings it home, whole family gets sick, hospital system overloads.
It wasn’t specifically kids suffer so oldies don’t die, but the continuation is that if the oldies are healthy, if anyone needs the hospital, there’ll be staff to look after them.
TL;DR people are taking the piss and making the jobs of HCWs harder… Not like that’s anything new 🙄
yeah it was obviously the same on any playground so the above comment saying it was “to safe elderly” is just very short sighted. Additionaly implying that this was the case in whole of Germany is again wrong. Each federal state had it’s own health regulations in place but yeah some of those were kind of mediated by the ministry of health. Anyway it was a lot more complex than what this comment suggests
Sure it was more complex. Not going to write a Phd here.
My point is, the society accepts rules even tough rules if it’s for everyone. If it’s fair. So, at Covid times younger people, who are less likely to get serious sickness were accepting being „caged“ for two years (exaggerating a bit. If you are 5 years old. 2 years is half of your life!)
I strongly miss this generational fairness when it comes to climate change. Not seeing any step back in terms of carbon consumption/ consumption at all from the older people.
Don’t know about your country. The bigger goal in Europe was to keep hospitals working. Goal was not to Triage people cos hospitals were crowed. That happened in the beginning in Northern Italy. At Triage you look at who has biggest chances of survival, who is worth to invest your effort. Guess if it’s the elderly or the younger.
Just to make it clear. It’s fine for me how it worked out in Germany. China is the blue print how it worked bad. But want to make my argument that all that rules were on the shoulders of the younger generation to safe the elderly.
Right now in Germany, we have an insane political discussion about carbon reduction. It’s about actions. Being active. So, your heaters need to be replaced from oil and gas to renewables. Yes, it will cost some money. Do you think people are following that goal to safe the younger generations? I‘m pretty pissed about my and the older generation. And concerned about the reality for my kids.
Indeed. Go out at the street and show you want change. Politics fear many people on streets fighting for their rights. Look at France, Israel. When was last time you fight for your rights?
We did but we’re paying for it now with the rise of “-isms” whose values are built on stifling change. 2-3 years of rapid change might have helped redefine an era of politics for the contrary. TBD I guess.
You mean this is a problem that the boomers and gen x created. THEY are the generations that controlled the corporations whose only concern was profit. THEY are the generations that pushed consumerism with no regard to the natural world. THEY are the generations that elected the politicians that allowed this all to happen. So here come the millennials and zoomers to clean up their mess, just like everything else they fucked up for the rest of us.
Sure people spending all day on TikTok and playing with cryptocurrencies are actually solving problems created by people who worked in the mines and watched TV.
The truth is, across all generations, everyone is doing anything to live the most confortable life possible according to their convictions, and YouTubers today are not better promoting their shitty gamer drinks or VPN services than a 1980s vendor trying to sell as much diesel engines as possible. It’s even more true when it comes to corporate, or you’ll have to tell me what’s is Zuckerberg doing for the planet that Bill Gates is not.
At any given time there were people willing to change the world, trying to make it more fair. We’re just never enough. And being a millennial I can assure you it’s not changing anytime soon, even tho things are getting shittier and shittier.
Playing with cryptocurrency (monopoly money/disney dollars) is an incredibly energy intense process. Extremely wasteful and damaging just to play with some made up money.
Yeah, don’t put the blame on us. In all my 29 years of life climate change has always been a big topic no one has done anything about.
We’re living in this ridiculous gerontocracy where old lizards bought by corporations are making decisions to benefit said corporations for the next couple of months, all the while the coming generations suffer.
At this point it’s too late. It’s time to owe up, apologise for being so greedy that you used up the world, leaving nothing for coming generations.
If you’re 29 that means you’re borderline millennial/gen z. Definitely not blaming you here. You are correct, this has been an issue for our entire lives and the generations before us have done exactly nothing to curtail the destruction of our planet
although it’s very common for the earlier generation to blame the later generation for the world sucking (or what they percieve as “sucking”), in this case it doesn’t work because not every boomer and gen-x-er is a CEO or past CEO
Looking at the voting results for younger generations, this isn’t even close to this simple. Yes, there is a slight shift towards more environmental policies/parties, but it is far from a majority even in the youngest age bracket that is allowed to vote (looking at voting results from the last general election in Germany).
Blaming the public over corporations is the #1 reason why we are in this mess in the first place. For decades, the narrative has been “it’s your fault and you need to change your habits”. It is a pointless and useless narrative because nobody is going to actively change anything like that until they are forced to. Even when we make moderate, easy efforts to do stuff like recycling, the recycling companies bitch and moan about how they can’t ship this shit off to China to let them do the work, and then throw away most of it, anyway. We PAY recycling companies to recycle this shit and they can’t be bothered to figure out how to recycle it. We PAY THEM to take away materials to use in new products, not the other way around.
In every aspect of people’s lives, you will find that corporations use up 90% of the resources that the general public use because corporations deal in economies-of-scale far bigger than anything a person or even a country can do. Corporations have been pushing the “blame the public” narrative to shift focus away from the decades of abuse they will continue to inflict on the planet. Corporation shit all over everything, and they will continue to do so in the name of profit. That is exactly what they are designed to do.
It takes governmental effort and regulations against the corporations to stop this sort of thing. They do it for clean water, and CFCs, and automotive design, and architecture, and many many other things. Why? Because a minority group of people who are struggling to make a living is never going to have enough power and clout as a large corporation or a government.
They produce like double of what we need, it’s not only what we need and buy, capitalism is extremely inefficient in the usage of resources, which brought us into this mess.
Yeah. Anything that isn’t consumed is destroyed. Case in point, dumpster diving at grocery stores is illegal. Fast fashion companies destroy clothes that don’t sell.
Yes! If we’re expecting corporations to grow a conscience and “Do the right thing^TM^” then we’re doomed.
Though I do think the corporations are somewhat responsible for the narrative that everyone is powerless except for them. People pushing the “but the corporations!” while being unwilling to make any changes themselves are actually just carrying water for them. Promoting malaise and doomerism is just letting them have their way.
At any rate trying to appeal to the corporations to do the right thing is a complete waste of time. We need to make more effort ourselves. Which means making an effort to reduce our own carbon emissions as individuals. While also participating in the political process to create regulations that force the corporations to do the right thing. Because they sure as hell won’t do it on their own no matter how much people whine about it on the internet.
I really think this narrative is counterproductive. It’s not like corporations produce greenhouse gasses because they think it’s fun. They’re doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
No corporation is going to choose more environmentally friendly practices out of the goodness of their own hearts unless those practices are cheaper.
I didn’t get past you contradicting yourself in the first three sentences. Sorry.
I think as someone who did “the things”, and that’s how I live now, it’s hard to look around and see basically no perceptible difference. The incentive is slim for the individual. Everyone going ‘sustainable’ is a pipe dream. The bulk of the population is never going to make those changes.
That’s what I was going to suggest but then I always feel this is a complicated problem and it’s not just one thing. It’s a lot of efforts on in different areas, but regulation is certainly one. It shouldn’t be that hard to do considering it’s one of the main responsibilities of government.
Have you seen how much CEOs get paid?
Corporations can switch to greener alternatives AND pay workers a living wage AND make a profit, without having the consumers pay the price.
All it takes is the willingness of politicians to force them to. Corporations raise prices because they’re allowed to, and they’ll take any excuse they can get to get more money out of people.
Gas prices have skyrocketed. First it was covid’s fault. Then it was the war in Ukraine. All the while gas corporations have been seeing record-breaking profits. It’s all just greed.
They’re doing it to produce goods that people want at the absolute minimal price possible.
And there are portions of people in our society that will pay for those minimal prices either because they can’t afford anything else, or strictly because it’s convenient for them to spend that little so that they have more money left over to do more stuff in their life elsewhere.
But there are also people that are willing to sacrifice and make changes to their lifestyles and spending practices to accommodate the impacts of their actions.
The same is true with corporations. Some large corpos in the world are actively trying to move towards sustainable, circular economies. I’m doing a lot of research right now into the textile industry, and two of the biggest corporations in that space that I’ve seen are doing decent work on the two fronts I previously mentioned are Lenzing (TENCEL™) and Aquafil (ECONYL®).
Lenzing uses wood of various species from places in Europe, all managed well and FSC/PEFC controlled, to draw out fibers and filaments that are just as fine and useful as polyester fibers/filaments, yet with the added bonus of biodegradability. They also recycle cotton clothing from collection centers in Spain and some larger textile service companies in southern Europe and mix that in with their wood-based feedstock to produce the same rayon fibers.
Aquafil runs on a similar model to Lenzing, except they base theirs on nylon instead of rayon. Aquafil collects ghost nets from around Europe and South America, along with other corporations’ scrap nylon (pre-consumer waste) and post-consumer waste from a number of brands (e.g. sunglasses, jackets, etc.) to regenerate nylon back into the same quality as you would find in virgin materials. Now, I don’t think that plastic is sufficient anymore thanks to the non-degradable waste associated with it, but it’s better than nothing.
Are there flaws with those 2 companies: of course. Their chemical processes might not be 100% closed loop and their claims might be overexaggerated in ways, but it’s better than nothing.
Anyways, what this examples shows is that there are corporations and even people on the ground that are willing to make more sustainable choices because they legitimately see the benefit of doing so compared to convention. Someone else might describe this as a form of an adoption life cycle, where you have those more willing to change and those less willing to change as practices and habits shift over time.
Could government help with that? I believe so. I think that’s just one lever of change though. If you’ve been following solar PV growth over the last decade and a half, then you know about the “contagion” phenomenon: some early adopters pick up solar, only for considerers and even late adopters to do the same as word of mouth and other social drivers influence decision making at a people level.
Could the same happen with other sustainable choices in the economy? I fall more into the early adopter camp, so I would say yes. I think corporations spend a lot of time and marketing convincing their customers that said corporations are the best and only options and that no other alternative exists out there: when there absolutely is or might be. Perhaps all it takes is demonstrating to people, doing, not talking, walking the walk, to change their minds. I think the same tactics could be used, in addition to government intervention.
Bottom-up + top-down is the strategy I’ve heard described by many proponents of sustainability, most notably Al Gore, and I’m all for it too. Luckily humans, at least in some countries around the world, live in free societies and can divide and conquer to work on both of these fronts to affect change.
Apparently there are still loads of people who don’t understand this simple fact and think everything that is done to make the world a better place is for climate change.
I mean, they both show a callous disregard for the fragility of life on this planet, and a keen disinterest in anything but short term convenience and comfort? Oh and profit, can't forget about MONEY
What has that to do with anything? Reducing single use plastics is environmental protection which is not the same as fighting climate change. No one who fights against plastics does so for climate change. Stop spreading such nonsense. Not even your linked article claims something like that.
Why would that be orthogonal? Most plastics are created using crude oil and natural gas feedstocks - the creation of these single use plastics directly impacts climate change.
Energv wise plastics are often super cheap to produce especially compared to their reusable and non plastic alternatives. IIRC the CO2 footprint is drastically lower for items like bags and straws made of plastic.
This argument keeps coming up as an excuse to do nothing.
It's not my fault but theirs!
Why should I change when they won't?
I'm just one person against all these big corps, why try?
Even if I stopped, it wouldn't make a difference.
Pure defeatism neglecting even any bit of responsibility.
Yet people who say this will put another child on the planet, buy yet another product from Apple on release, love fast fashion, buy the cheapest goods possible, toss their meal as soon as they're full, vote egoistically, take the cheapest trip to wherever, drive a car, toss cigarette butts on the ground, and so much more.
It's always easier to blame others. Yes, corporations are shit, but remember, they are made up of people like you and I.
WE work there.
WE buy their crap.
WE vote for the same politicians over and over again (or don't vote at all).
WE put another child on this planet to go through this shit.
WE as humans are the problem.
I feel the need to remind people that the concept of the ecological footprint was invented by BP to direct the focus of climate fears away from large corporations and onto individuals.
we have the 80% solution and it’s nuclear power, but whatever y’all keep wailing and gnashing teeth and denying the obvious. I’m just gonna keep on living I guess and hope my house survives the shitty weather.
We have what, 10 years to try stop the planet to get over 1,5ºC? 20 over 2ºC?, that’s pretty much the time it takes to build a new nuclear power plant from 0.
Go look at your local Walmart and it’s bazillion products. They expect to sell almost everything in that store multiple times within a month. All that generates enormous waste on a scale that’s literally impossible for the earth to sustain for another 100 years without total ecological collapse.
We’re living in the single most polluting decade in human history, every decade, since all of us were born. Even if the entire Lemmy user base become subsistence farming monks, the factories would just keep churning out poison unphased.
I’m not saying it’s bad for people to try and consume more responsibly. I’m just saying it doesn’t make a difference over any meaningful time period until there’s a radical change in how our global economy functions.
Environmental catastrophe will continue until we literally cannot ignore it, only then will we do anything substantial about it. Unfortunately that’s just how our society works.
I don’t agree with you. Many individuals changing their behavior is what it takes for an economic shift in our society. By thinking that we don’t have an impact we loose motivation to change our behavior. So if you say you are annoyed by big supermarkets filling our planet with waste that’s fine, I agree. But this needs to lead to a change in behavior, first of yourself, then for those who notice you haven’t died from eating mostly vegan products and buying from local farmers markets and then hopefully for most people in our society.
Companies produce as long as people consume their products. If commnsumers switch to sustainable products (quite different from products advertised as sustainable) companies will have to follow
My dipshit family in the UK are all right wingers (with the exception of a few member) and completely deny climate change. I sent them this article as well as the article about the water in Florida getting up to 100F…”Don’t be daft. We’re in a warming phase.” Ya….whatever THAT means you fucking chodes.
I was having a conversationg with some red necks a few years ago. They were all talking about winter’s not the same here anymore, above freezing half the winter, not as much snow, summer is weird is goes right through October now and we don’t really get an autumn anymore.
“Weather’s not like it used to be,” one of thems said, and I said, “yep the climate is changing.” They stared at me with their mouths open.
These retards are literally watching it happen with their own eyes and they still won’t believe it. It’s insane.
The biggest problem with politics these days is there can’t be ANY overlap between the parties. They can’t agree on ANYTHING. If a democrat says “I like breathing oxygen,” a republican will say he prefers breathing something else. There’s so much that people in both parties agree on in principle, but they can never say it. I think the left is more willing to agree with the right, because the left is more principled, but a republican is simply incapable of telling someone on the left “you’re right and I agree with you.” They instead have to be contrarian about everything. Whatever the left says, never agree with it, and make a statement of complete opposition, no matter what. When the left starts supporting a war against Russia, the right starts supporting Russia. It’s sickening.
My conservative family loves to use the arrogance argument. What I hear is that they don’t want to believe humans can change the climate, because they’re scared of humanity being responsible or accountable for their actions.
I’m no climate scientist, but from the research I’ve done, there are phases like this to Earth’s natural climate cycle… Earth has gone through very warm eras, and very cold eras, aka ice ages.
If you look back at our modern history closely enough, climate science in the early years of the industrial age showed that we were headed towards a new ice age with lower than normal global mean temperatures… Clearly that didn’t come to pass.
There’s also an unprecedented amount of mammal biomass on the planet (Hank Green did a yt short talking about this recently); and I think it goes without saying that, there’s an astronomical amount more pollution than before.
Examining the evidence, the climate is changing more rapidly and more extremely than before and the causes for this are obvious to anyone paying attention… Simply, more people & mammal biomass, more industry, with next to no environmental protections that actually make an impact, with massive deforestation and destruction of sea life, where a significant amount of oxygen producing and CO2 filtering is happening.
So what I’m saying is, yes, there are “warming phases” to Earth’s natural ecosystem, however this rapid and drastic of a change is uncharacteristic of the natural changes or planet naturally goes through. At the very least, people should recognize that the amount of pollution and destruction of the natural ecosystem is damaging our planet’s ability to sustain life… Like human life. So whether the environmental protections are because of climate change or simply a self serving goal of trying to keep our planet habitable by humans, long-term, honestly, everyone should support environmental protections.
My housemate is like that, came up with some nonsense about how he saw a video the other day about how there was climate change happen when the Vikings were around or something so it’s not as clear cut as people think. And today, with it barely breaking 20 degrees in July, said half jokingly that we need more carbon. The shit summer here this year is fuel for his fire. Complete moron.
Don’t even waste your breath convincing idiots like that. They are too uninformed on too many topics to be worth investing the effort in. You’ve got a good shot at convincing people who are on the fence but culture warriors who rely on Steven Crowder for their talking points aren’t going to be convinced by anyone or anything.
Yeah I’ve given up on him to be honest. Kind of sad, we grew up together and he used to be quite alternative but has been sliding into someone I don’t recognise. I can’t comprehend it and most of the time I just let him expose what an idiot he’s become. Just the other day he said “Trump wasn’t that bad, he was the best of a bad bunch”. I could hardly believe it… absolutely staggering. But yeah, like you said, it’s a lost cause and he will only get worse and lost in his toxic Facebook groups.
Yeah, here’s what you tell them. Temperatures were at baseline when the industrial revolution began. That’s just a handful of generations. We’ve now seen an increase of, what 2 degrees C since then? I don’t know the exact number. The point is, this sort of increase is not present anywhere else in the geological record. It takes thousands of years for average global temperatures to naturally increase to a point like this one. There are literally no hard spikes–until the industrial revolution began. The only credible takeaway is that humans are the problem.
You are actually incorrect. Of course there are massive spikes like when a meteor hits or a super volcano erupts. But A that is not relevant. And B records can not show this, they don’t have the chronological resolution to do that. Kind of the same way you can not measure the growth of hair over one day with a ruler, it is not possible. But over dozens of days it is possible. But how could you then tell if the hair grew much at one day and little on others? Your can’t.
Same here in montreal, my grass has never been this green in the middle of july. Kinda weird that we had all those forest fires when the summer’s been pretty damn mild for now
Mild in Montreal, maybe, but check out the Canadian Drought Monitor as the rest of Canada is in drought. Like, the entire rest of Canada. …canada.ca/…/current-drought-conditions
Over here in the west it’s never been so dry. Pastures are brown, hay and crops aren’t just stunted but are dying before maturity. Trees are yellowing and dropping leaves. Plague of grasshoppers eating everything that was still green. Every day is hot and the air is full of smoke, it feels like the end of the world over here.
That isn’t “just” climate change though, it’s also urbanisation and the way you guys over there use ground water. It’s a combination of a lot of things, climate change is only one puzzle piece in the whole scheme of things.
Also, the drought thing is easily combatable with desalination, which has a few other benefits. The main caveat is, it’s expensive. But, it’s a lot cheaper than having to deal with various other things due to the droughts.
Guessing you’ve never been to Western Canada. We only have a couple major cities, and we don’t use that much groundwater both as it tends to be saline and because we have plenty of surface water to use due to snowmelt runoff. Also we don’t have anything to desalinate, unless we’re talking about that low-quality groundwater, which is a very expensive proposition as you say to get any significant volume.
We’re not concerned about water for drinking, city usage etc. Most cities are on major rivers that are running near normally. Hydro dams have tons of storage to run until next winter’s snow. On my farm I have dugouts that capture runoff, they are full. I have shallow wells on GUDI aquifers where the water is near the top of the casing! I’m irrigating my garden and my orchard like mad out of my yard dugout and that usage isn’t even noticeable compared to evaporation losses.
We’re concerned that our crops are dying, our livestock are starving (sold mine already) and almost none of our land is irrigated. In BC the trees are dying and burning for lack of rain and there is no way to irrigate them of course. This part of the country has long relied on a steady cycle of June and July thunderstorms for moisture - but the thunderstorms have dried up.
No, I have never been to Western Canada (it’s very high on my bucket list, though) and I was broadly talking about North America. Sorry for the generalization. This year being also an El Nino year may have contributed…while some people will say otherwise, Europe has been uncharacteristically moist. We got a lot of places that already have reached 90% of their yearly average precipitation…
Yeah for sure. I knew my region was kind of a standout, but that map is even more damning than I thought, thanks for the link. If I’m reading the article correctly, the issues started long before the summer, the spring was really dry. At least the atlantic got some pretty heavy rain in June, though I’d be curious to see the july report when it comes out
Same in Vancouver, though the deep heat usually comes in August. It is however extremely dry. I can’t remember the last time it actually rained. Looks like 2-4 rain events since May 1.
Newly-minted Albertan here, extreme thunderstorms are a weekly occurrance. Haven’t lived here long enough to know if that’s normal, but in Grand Forks, BC a thunderstorm was a rarity.
Welcome to Alberta, thunderstorms are the dominant weather in the summer. Make sure your shingles are tacked down around the edges of the roof, even if it isn’t “proper” because updrafts will tear them off. If your neighbourhood codes allow it, switch to metal roofing when the hail trashes the shingles you have now and save the hassle of replacing shingles non stop.
I moved from AB to SK 8 years ago and we had a similar storm cycle then, but it’s been dead for almost 5 years now. Just hot dry sun. Thunderstorms are the main source of summer rain as we haven’t seen a real multi-day “soaker” in many years now, so we’re in big trouble.
you will probably not be entirled tobhealthcare in Europe either then.
Usually the idea is that you pay as a worker into the healthcare system. If you never paid in here you will probably have to fo dor private insurance and you’ll be faced with similiar rates like in the US because the age of entry is crucial for the rates of private health insurance