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What a fantastic presentation!

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Other countries share blame too:

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The planet has only warmed around a degree so far, but already Arctic sea ice has retreated dramatically, its loss amplifying warming and helping tip parts of the north, like Arctic Alaska, into an entirely new climate state. All that warmth means Greenland is now shedding about 300 billion tons of frozen water into the sea each year, causing sea levels to rise at an accelerating rate. Ice losses across Antarctica are also contributing to that rise and could play a much bigger role in the future; research published this decade found that the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica might have already entered a state of irreversible decline that will raise global sea levels by ten feet.

As low-lying communities glimpse a future of permanent inundation, offshore the buildup of heat is cooking ecosystems to death. From 2014 to 2017, the world’s shallow water coral reefs suffered a global bleaching event, losing the symbiotic algae that give them color and provide them with food thanks to heat stress. Between 2016 and 2017 half of all corals in the Great Barrier Reef died due to bleaching-induced starvation.

“One of the headline stories for this decade has been the pace at which coral reefs are succumbing to heat,” said Kim Cobb, a coral reef scientist who heads the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech. “This has been a very acute wake up call.”

Less headline-grabbing but equally alarming: Warmer ocean water holds less oxygen, a fact of physics that is beginning to manifest everywhere. In 2017, two studies pointed to an ongoing climate change-fueled depletion of oxygen in Earth’s surface oceans. While nobody is sure exactly how bad this will get, history doesn’t bode well: Research published last year suggests that global warming-fueled ocean anoxia might have been the chief culprit in the worst mass extinction event life on Earth ever experienced.

“This is a really serious problem,” said Matt Long, an oceanographer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “We’re fundamentally changing the metabolic status of the largest ecosystem on Earth, at a rate that’s not well-quantified.”

But it’s on land where the consequences of rapid climate change are becoming most apparent to humans, whether it’s the fires of unprecedented size and intensity tearing across the western U.S. and Australia, the historic downpours from Houston to Bangladesh, vanishing snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, or deadly heat waves in Europe and India. In the high Arctic, the very ground communities have built their homes on is crumbling as once-stable permafrost turns to mush.

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These articles are doing a disservice in persuading people who aren’t persuaded. Very few people I know deny climate change. They just deny that human activity is causing it. They’re idiots, but that is what it is.

These articles need to more clearly link the climate change to carbon, etc. Not just go on and on about how the Earth is changing. Because that will just be written off as, “The Earth goes through changes over time, we’ve had ice ages and thaws before, nothing we can do about it.”

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No amount of careful phrasing or wording is going to change their minds.

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Well, an honest problem is that you either have to trust the scientists or understand the science. Most people (myself included) really are not going to understand the science behind it at a fundamental level. I still barely remember my college science courses that went through it and how complicated the base science is (acidification breaking down shell compounds in marine species leading to greater CO2, etc.). Most people aren’t going to be able to grasp the actual chemistry of this, not because they’re stupid, but because it isn’t what they do. Just like most 50 year olds probably aren’t going to remember much calculus when they’ve been working as an insurance agent or nurse for 30 years.

It’s a similar issue to the anti-vaxxers. People are not actually going to understand the science, and there is no shame in that. But they don’t want to feel stupid, and they think they know more than they do, and they are contrarians so they pick some stupid line in the sand.

This line in the Sand also conveniently lets them keep driving their SUVs and running their air conditioning 3/4 of the year.

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Kevin Drum’s new article talks a bit about the difficulty of changing lifestyles even among people who nominally believe in climate change:

In 2018, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago fielded a national poll on climate change. Only 71 percent of respondents agreed it was happening, and of those, more than 80 percent said the federal government should do something about it.

Then the pollsters presented a scenario in which a monthly tax would be added to your electric bill to combat climate change. If the tax was $1, only 57 percent supported it. If the tax was $10, that plummeted to 28 percent. Those aren’t typos. Only about half of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to fight climate change. Only about a quarter are willing to pay $10 per month.

And that’s hardly the only evidence of the uphill climb we face. There’s abundant confirmation of the public’s unwillingness to accept sacrifices in living standards to combat climate change. In France, a 2018 gasoline tax increase had to be withdrawn after yellow vest activists—generally an eco-friendly movement—took to the streets in furious protest. In Germany, where the growth of renewable energy has made it possible to shut down old power plants, the Fukushima disaster in Japan prompted the closing of climate-friendly nuclear plants before coal plants—despite the fact that German nukes have a spotless safety record over the past 30 years and are under no threat from tsunamis. In Canada, a recent poll reported that most people say they’re willing to make changes in their daily lives to fight climate change—but only when the changes are kept vague. When pollsters asked specific questions, only small fractions said they’d fly less frequently, purchase an electric car, or give up meat. And a paltry 16 percent said they’d be willing to pay a climate tax of $8–$40 per month.

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Yeah, I feel that unless technology provides a miracle solution we’re pretty much locked in. I posted an article about Santa Barbara a few weeks ago where even in that very environmentally-conscious city, they didn’t even want to give up some downtown parking space in order to meet their targets.

When even people who profess to care about this stuff don’t want to spend a dollar a month or have less parking and these people vote, I don’t see how we’re ever going to be able to head this off. The ticking of the time bomb isn’t enough, it’s just going to have to blow up and hope that we can piece things back together.

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Ooo, more good news.

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The overall problem couldn’t be simpler. The fossil fuels we burn are fucking up the atmosphere, making it harder for the warm sunlight to escape. This is raising earth’s temperatures.

You don’t have to understand chemistry to understand the problem.

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A few of us will probably muddle through. But I think on the way there technological civilization collapses and billions starve to death. Climate change + fossil fuel depletion = we’re fucked.

We can’t solve climate change. We’re already fucked. Reducing consumption is the only way to mitigate our fuckedness. Anyone who says anything different is mopping the decks of the Titanic.

All y’all are like: “My basement is filling with water. I have 3 options: 1) reinforce my floor to hopefully hold the water back 2) siphon out the water and hope it keeps up with whatever is filling it or 3) find and fix the leak, but naw, to fix the leak I’d have to get wet.”

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But if you don’t understand the chemistry, you have to believe other people. Which is something that ignorant people often have issue with. If they don’t understand it themselves, they are anti-authority and won’t believe others who do understand it.

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That Mother Jones headline is telling. What is needed, indeed, is the collective sacrifice and esprit de corps that naturally occur in wars (at least in big ones). If we took a Rosie the Riveter attitude toward climate change we would stand a much better chance of beating it. But human psychology is against us (vague intimations of ice caps melting 30 years hence lacks the punch of bombs striking the Arizona), and that is compounded by the tragic political fact that (at least in the U.S.) a huge chunk of our populace and one of our major political parties refuses even to acknowledge the problem. It would be like if in 1942 the official stance of the GOP had been that the Pearl Harbor attack never happened. Take that, Rosie!

I’m reminded for the millionth time that humans, though uniquely capable of rationality, are not rational by default any more than we are concert pianists by default. Add to this the enormous difficulty of achieving collective action in any direction (such that I’m sometimes rather amazed that we even have countries at all, or corporations, or armies, or any of it), and, well…

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I think those poll results reflect some level of distrust. Do I trust that my utility company will use that $10 / month in a way that is meaningful for fighting climate change? Probably I do not.

Similarly, the gas tax in France was paired with the elimination of a tax on the wealthy. That’s what prompted the protests: that fighting climate change falls on the shoulders of the poor and the working class through regressive taxes while the wealthy get tax cuts.

This will be the real drawback to carbon-based tax schemes: they will be massively regressive, and unless they are paired with alternatives to allow working people to avoid the tax — e.g. decent public transportation — they will always be deeply unpopular. People have to eat now, and don’t care about what happens in a hundred years.

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In a Sean Carrol podcast he was talking with someone about climate and the point came up that it’s quite possible a large segment of the populace will jump from “climate change isn’t real / isn’t caused by humans” to “too late to do anything, oh well (lol)” in a sort of mental gymnastic transfer. In fact, it may be that certain powers that be are banking on it… which is evil.

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Oh, I think that’s guaranteed and certainly part of the climate change denial plan.

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I’m (not) sorry, saying people should pay $X more tax for “reasons” is pretty vague too, for all we know it would be to pay a carbon tax to keep doing the same thing, at worst for the benefit of corporations who want the status quo.

And this too.

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I use this site https://skepticalscience.com/ a lot to get a good understanding on climate change science. Also it debunks the myths of the deniers.

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For fucking diamonds?