this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Terrible work, everyone.

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

When I was young, they told me we were working on new technology and it was going to stop the climate issue.

.

When I was young, I saw polite little PSA's in magazine's telling me not to shower too long.

When I was young, I heard of the hydrogen car.

When I was young, I watched the crocuses grow in the spring.

When I was young, the snow fell on the correct dates.

When I was older, I realized the scope of it all.

When I was older, we were setting up the wind turbines.

When I was older, they were testing out new tech to harvest energy from currents.

When I was older, I saw my first electric car.

When I was older, we got new recycling bins.

When I was older, my neighbor threw his oil-heater out.

When I was older, I learned that cold melt water from the pole was slowing the Golf stream.

When I was older, I saw no crocuses.

When I was older, it snowed a day in May.

Today, I fear for it all.

Today, we are throwing the wind turbines in the trash after their use-life ran out.

Today, I know we don't use solar panels cause it'd make electricity too cheap.

Today, they had posters begging us to sort correctly.

Today, I saw even more electric cars, and I knew they still ruined the climate.

Today, I looked outside, at the snow that came two weeks ago and stayed.

Today, it hit two degrees.

Will there be a tomorrow?

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Still huffing that "maybe China can do geoengineering" copium so I don't fucking kill myself

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 years ago (2 children)

we're gonna see the global south independently start dumping calcium carbonate into the upper atmosphere within a decade, mark my words

i wish em luck

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Sulphate aerosols, probably. Calcium carbonate is better for land/ocean based geoengineering. But yeah: the potential for unilateral action with stratospheric aerosol injection in particular is very high. There's some evidence that doing it from the southern hemisphere will help mitigate some of the negative side effects, but that's still inconclusive. We desperately need to talk about the global governance of this stuff before we deploy it, but we won't.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I read a sci-fi novel recently where venezuela just went ahead and started dumping sulfates into the atmosphere without permission and the global north had a huge tantrum over governance and censured them constantly in the un etc, but nobody dared to actually stop them bc it was literally the only thing stopping the planet from turning into an oven 💀

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Geo engineering is peak liberalism because it is only a rational fix and not a suicidal thing to do if you believe liberal ideas of infinite sustained economic growth and civilizational progress being linear march forward while ignoring collapse happens at least once a century with total collapse every few centuries. A ~250 year average on the churn of history. I find it nuts there are people who believe human history is a steadily march of forward progress and economic growth rather than a series of stumbles, falls, and lurches.

Am daytime drunk...

The big problem with all these magic geoengineering fixes that allow petrol states to continue existing (looking at you Venezuela, US and Russia too) is when we have a global economic collapse or major conflict, the industrial mass production of sulfur compounds to pump into the upper atmosphere (a costly economic activity at any meaningful scale, not a minor undertaking) comes crashing to a halt and things are 10 times worse than they would have been without doing it in the first place. Everyone pushing this suicidal bullshit always leaves out the caveat that the mass production and release of geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere if done for any significant period of time has to continue for the rest of human civilization or everything dies. Geoengineering allows us to kick the can down the road (something human civilizations strive at) on abolishing petrol states and enables a level of atmospheric carbon that couldn't happen otherwise because the changing climate would have caused wars and civilizational collapse that mean a lot of people die, empires fall, but most life on earth (and humans) still survive.

The geoengineering ideas and even people on the supposed "left" supporting it is what has me at this point believing all life will be gone from earth within three centuries max. That rather than 2 to 5 degrees we are going to trigger a greenhouse warming cascade like happened on Venus (earths twin) that early on crossed an atmospheric water vapor and methane tipping point. I'm sure there will be more magic fixes that attempt to mask rather than undo or stabilize. Carbon cycle breaks forever, is done. Issue isn't with the technical fesability but human behavior to date on a macro scale, I have to believe geoengineering will happen while the petrol states continue increasing their rate of carbon production due to the breathing room it creates. US keeps pouring money into discovering new fossil fuel reserves around the world, US Dept of Energy keeps inventing novel methods to find and exploit previously unreachable fossil fuel ie how to extract shale oil and gas via fracking. Global warming will be masked for 50 years to a century or two until there is a world war or economic collapse, at which point that century of global warming happens in less than a decade triggering a rapid series of catastrophic tipping points (endgame ones being inverted carbon sinks, clathrate gun, water vapor, etc) faster than anyone has means to respond.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I did my postdoc on geoengineering, and I'm sorry to tell you that I basically agree with all of this.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

Gonna be honest - if the Great Dying didn't kill off all life on Earth, I don't see even especially reckless human activity doing it either. CO2 from that period went from 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm for reference, and Earth got like 8-10°C warmer then. Even shitty capitalist market mechanics would have abandoned carbon emissions at this point. If you want to turn Earth into Venus, you need to actively make it your goal. I mean burning every single last drop of fossil fuel faaaar after it's stopped being profitable.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we've caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight

The copium is "new technology not invented yet might be engineered by China, who plans for the future beyond make line go up next quarter" since the alternative is we're all fucking dead and nothing any human being does has any point at all

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (10 children)

As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we've caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight

It's not quite that bad. 2-3° is probably locked in (barring sci-fi technology like large scale carbon capture), but not the kind of runaway that would lead to Venus. You're right about aerosol masking hiding a lot of the impact, but that damage will be very front-loaded (since the residence time of the aerosols in the atmosphere is only on the order of months), and limited to probably a few tenths of a degree. Not nothing, but not enough for us to go Venus.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ministry for the future? I should get around to finishing that

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Specifically China will coordinate the effort and crush any military resistance to it seeing as the decline of the US is thoroughly assured now and we're due for a military humiliation showing how much our arsenal has decayed

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There's also having ships spraying seawater mist to make larger, brighter marine clouds.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

Marine cloud brightening is surprisingly tricky on a technical level. There's been some discussion of trying to retrofit cargo ships to create larger, more long-lasting wakes, which might actually be more effective. The albedo of calm seawater is VERY low (close to that of asphalt), and with the number of cargo ships out there, even a moderate change might have an impact.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago (2 children)

China, build the solar sunshade curry-space

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 years ago

Yeah, it's time to start making apologies for the lack of terror

[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 years ago (1 children)

gui-better to the big oil capitalists

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago

Finally, someone speaking some sense.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 years ago (1 children)

born too late to live past 50, born too early to not be born because complex life on earth is extinct, born just in time to die

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 years ago (2 children)

please god can we just start killing the people responsible before we turn our home into fucking venus

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm sure the sun will move away from us any day now and we can go back to normal no-mouth-must-scream

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

geordi-no Putting sulfates in the atmosphere to dim the sun

geordi-no Putting a big sunshade between the Earth and the Sun

geordi-yes Pushing the Earth further away

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Why did I think that was Todd Howard at first? It makes no sense.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

My Dragonborn Shouts Don't Work Because My Mouth Despawned

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 years ago

think reading this made me dissociate

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 years ago

Welp, line goes up...

this-is-fine

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago

Yeah but have you considered the oil industry shareholder profits?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 years ago

every day I get closer to adventure-time

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago

Comrades, this scares me.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago

My heart yearns for The Terror.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Anyone else notice the USDA Growing zones have shifted a bunch too?

Some guy in Ohio noted that his area used to be 4b and is now 7b which is warm enough to grow limes. In the West Coast the change has been a creation of shitloads of microclimates all over the damn place.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

The USDA actually updated their zone map the other day to account for this. Some regions saw significant changes.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago

this-is-fine It's been swell Holocene, hope whatever comes next does a better job than us...

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago (3 children)

what the fuck, how is this year so so much worse than last year?!

horror

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 years ago

It's a very strong El Niño this year, for the first time since 2017. La Niña typically suppresses global average temperatures, while El Niño raises them.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

Feedback loops?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah, but its a balmy 72 degrees in late November right now, so actually everything is fine.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm gonna be sunbathing during the winter solstice

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

I mean, that's not a terrible idea given how little daylight we get.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

And he said: Behold Adam is become as one of us, knowing good and evil: now, therefore, lest perhaps he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever...

We're going to need to get ready to throw absolutely everything we have at a worldwide climate revolution. Strife, misery, and death is coming regardless.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

All posts must include a link to their source.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

This is fine

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Imagining a sci-fi series set in the distant future where sentient birds rule the earth and treat apes with the same contempt a lot of people treat stuff like spiders and snakes

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