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worldwidewave ,

And you’ll never believe the rent prices on the other ⅓

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.

In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.

The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.

That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.

NineMileTower ,

Dude, shut up, I’m trying to doom scroll over here .

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

My gf calls me a “radical optimist” for believing in people eventually doing the right thing :)

ModernRisk ,
@ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

The social media echo chamber has that effect. But statistically speaking, this is humanity’s golden age. The average lifespan is up, we have instant global communication and positioning (wow!), conflict is down (take the wider view)…

Like, even if you added Ukraine and Gaza to this, they’re small compared to historical conflicts. And this graph would be even more pronounced if we normalized it as percentages against the global population – literally the last few generations have been least likely to die in conflict across all of human history.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/304264d5-5dc5-48a4-8d09-aef1ff31cc02.png

Nougat ,

As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it.

While this is true, we must also take into account who exactly will benefit from that engineering and survive. Not everyone will be able to take advantage of non-global engineering solutions, and just like with every technological advancement, the differential will be used by those "with" to subjugate those "without."

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

The global solutions will eventually happen. Right now nationalism gets in the way of it, but on the timescales of geology, nationalism is a blip. Hell, many scholars cite 1648 as the creation of the current system – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system – so hopefully this is just a phase and we’ll get over it and start global scale geoengineering before we get cooked :)

Can you imagine a UN agency in charge of sun shades positioned at Sun-Earth L1 that reduced the total sunlight hitting the earth by 0.1% and halted the heating problem entirely? Wouldn’t solve the carbon dioxide levels, but it’d be a start :D

(The orbital mechanics folks can chime in here. Sunshades at L1 are unstable because L1 is unstable, and sunlight exerts pressure on them like solar sails. However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology. Said rockets use hydrocarbons to launch, ironically.)

Nougat ,

Eventually, yes, and in the meantime, the global divide between rich and poor will grow ever wider.

There are exactly two ways that that divide can shrink. The wealthy of the world proactively using their wealth for the common good, out of pure philanthropy; or by being physically forced to. This applies regardless of climate change problems or their potential solutions.

Olgratin_Magmatoe , (edited )

However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today’s technology.

Not a scientist, but I’m still fascinated by this stuff.

The cost of that is going to be the big issue. No government is going to want to pay for routine shipments of fuel and parts to L1, which is expensive as hell. And I wouldn’t bet on international cooperation being a thing either. Each country is going to be too busy fighting over food and water, and keeping migration at bay.

Completely guessing here, it would probably be cheaper to raise the albedo of the planet through various means. Maybe including massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans. At least it’s on planet and therefore hypothetically can be done with minimal fossil fuel use. How to do that without fucking up the environment with chemicals for cloud nuclei is the hard part.

That, or intentionally inducing a light nuclear winter, ideally without the nuclear part. With enough particulates in the upper atmosphere, it would do the job. The tricky part is doing that without overdoing it. This is the dumb version, but it’s personally how I see things going. Especially because this is something a lone country could probably do on its own. China doesn’t want to deal with all the effects of climate change? They may light up a bunch of islands in the Pacific with nukes to “solve” it.

MTK ,

I think people are missing the point, it’s not about who survives, it’s about who dies and suffers.

If I told you (made up numbers) that in the next 50 years, 100 million people will die an average of 20 years early because of climate change. Sure, 100 million is just about 1.3% of humans, but it’s still 100 million people, who will die at 50 instaed of 70, or at 25 instead of 45, these are people who will probably die from heat, from natrual disasters, from famine, from poor health as economies collapse.

We won’t be fine, someone will be, but WE, as a group, won’t be fine.

In fact, we are already not fine but it’s mostly felt in poor contries.

Not to kill the mood but the harsh truth is that the generations before us doomed a lot of us, and the current generations are just starting to get it, and future generations will truly feel the ignorance of our past and the indifference of our present.

ininewcrow ,
@ininewcrow@lemmy.ca avatar

I do agree that we are very inventive, capable and imaginative when it comes to diving great problems.

Unfortunately we are also capable of becoming very destructive, ignorant, selfish and absolutely brutal to one another especially under a lot of stress and anxiety.

My greatest fear in the coming decades is mass migration and entire populations of people moving to places where they won’t be welcome, and people in places where everyone is relocating to worried that it will engage endanger their survival. The biggest problems we’ll face won’t be environmental… they will be political and social.

Buffalox ,

Climate scientist is 1/3rd wrong.

Gsus4 ,
@Gsus4@mander.xyz avatar

I guess 1/3 of the planet will be just fine…like with a ship…the 1/3 that floats will be dragged down by sinking parts. simscale.com/…/why-did-titanic-sink-engineer/

DarkCloud ,

Feels like it’s been speeding up the past few years. Barely had a winter season this year.

MediaBiasFactChecker Bot ,

The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support

wazoobonkerbrain ,

Yeah. That shadowy underground source. The Mirror.

Aurenkin ,

The bias bot refuses to look into the mirror. How apt.

thejoker954 ,

So I guess we just have to leave lemmy world? This bias bot shit is ridiculous. Get rid of it.

troyunrau ,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

You could just, you know, block it and move on.

thejoker954 ,

True. But that doesnt take care of the root of the problem.

Carrolade ,

The Daily Mirror is a trashy tabloid out of the UK.

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