Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
We didn't "miss our opportunity," we are being strangled by an international oil oligarchy.
The only solution is personally killing the Black Snake, probably to a man. That's the only solution, and I am not a part of that solution. Doesn't seem like a fucking "opportunity" to me, it sounds like a desperate war for a dominant species I don't even like belonging to.
I say we accept our fate and pollute as much as we can to speed run through global warming right to the next ice age. Get us all frozen to death and the planet can do mastodons again.
The world missed it's opportunity to prevent climate change
Yes?
It's missed it multiple times and it will continue to do so. The Paris climate accords were an absolute joke yet even the outcome of that was just ignored by all the important players. That was when Obama was in charge, now we have trump, good luck with that
Technically we probably missed it even by the first Earth Day in 1970. Repercussions of what we started in the 20th century took a lot of time to manifest evidence, with the oceans probably acting as a filter to hide most of it, until it couldn't.
But the Paris Accords, the IPCC, all the rest, yeah it's a joke.
There will be adaptation either way. It's still lame to shift agenda to "subsidizing adaptation" to support it getting even worse. Our current adaptation path
See. No need to worry about there not being an adapting strategy. The part about cutting forest fire mitigation and FEMA budgets doesn't quite make sense, except for boosting insurance premiums.
Adaptation was not defined. It could mean have the world's rich accomodate the world's poor, but our failure point has been poltiically that we could not sacrifice just the rich oil company's extortionist profit power to reduce our energy costs in addition to future sustainability expenses/compromises. How can that broader failure of direct immediate social benefit translate into future political support for social sacrifice for humanist purposes.
A side note, the only policy that was ever going to, or will ever, stop global warming is a carbon/GHG tax with the proceeds paid to citizens/residents as a dividend. Demonic warmongering for losing wars, along with the divisiveness it invites for inflation and attacks against the economy, with more oligarchist and zionist supremacism as the winning solution is necessary to make you more miserable, and in your misery, lose all concern for human sustainability while consumed with anxiety over your near term future.
Back to adaptation, perhaps a politically relevant class is relatively wealthy residents of Phoenix. Should "we" give them free homes somewhere that is not an abomination to humanity? Compared to trucking desalinated water into Phoenix for 200 years, digging them a canal from the Great lakes would be a bargain. Florida coastal home owners vote in what is sometimes a swing state... should we build them a sea wall for entire state?
Surely, with electric bills set to soar 300% because we politically require all the AI datacenters to bring skynet surveilance state that ensures skynet support (or China wins), cannot tolerate an extra 10% electricity increase to subsidize the poor's access to AC, since Skynet will make the poor unneeded anyway.
The problem with supporting adaptation, is that you give the politically relevant classes a lifeline to support continued climate terrorism. The lifeline being that they will get bailed out after we are finishing arguing about who deserves to survive/be bailed out.
The other issue with adaptation, is that it financially costs less to mitigate worsening than it does spending on ever increasing adaptation. Even if you win political support for the stupid option, it is still smarter/cheaper to mitigate instead.
Climate change has not caused nearly enough harm for people to start giving a shit in large enough numbers. Individualism and apathy are so entrenched that we need to be at a point where we're scavenging for our next meal before we take radical action. Not to mention disinformation telling us that climate change is a hoax or that we can't do anything about it so there's no point in trying.
Finally a realistic title. We as a society have been so reluctant to talk about adaptation because that means we're going to lose what we have thanks to mistakes, ignorance, greed, and lies.
What do you disagree with? Seems like it's just acknowledging the reality of where we are heading.
I think it underestimates the value of climate mitigation. A focus on reducing emissions may not save us from a 3 degree world - and a 5 degree world after that, and a 10 degree world after that - but it could delay those milestones and give us more time to adapt. For example, I think a 40-foot rise in sea level is inevitable in the next few centuries - even a two degree rise guarantees both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt - but delaying that 40-foot rise from 2080 to 2150 makes a huge difference in our ability to prepare for it and in the lives of people living in the flood zone now.
I also think climate change is a symptom of the underlying disease of capitalism/technofeudalism. Local and community resilience efforts treat the symptom but leave the disease free to run rampant in new and horrible ways.
(Imagine: a city puts in battery backup in case of grid failure, but the megacorp manufacturing the batteries forces them to use its proprietary software and pay service fees, and when the grid goes down the megacorp hits the city with millions in extra fees and threatens to turn off the power if they don't pay.)
Not the person you asked, but my critique would be: It moves the focus away from decarbonization towards solving very obvious local short-term problems. A move to gain credibility/popularity in the public eye, instead of pushing for long-time measures that have a globally distributed effect. Aka "there is no glory in prevention".
That said, I know it's easy to critique like I did without being directly involved. Perhaps the idea is to then use this new political capital to push for those measures again. It may be a smart move, and it will certainly be a good thing to push for adaptation measures locally anyway, before everyone can finally agree that they are needed. But it does feel like giving up on the cost-effective but unpopular decarbonization.
That's actually a part I don't disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don't treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.
And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.
Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.
If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying "hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything's good now, go back to consuming as usual".
Exactly. Brace for it.
Sure, but I mean... how⁉️
Depends on where you're from. But roughly, trying to build a community, adapting your living place to a warmer climate, adapting your diet, maintaining the best health you can, reducing your reliance on anything industrialized, trying to increase the vegetation cover in your vicinity, learning crafting skills. If you live in a place too close to the ocean and with low altitude, or some place with high water stress, or somewhere likely to hit 50ºC, or maybe a place in the epicenter of likely geopolitical conflicts, consider migrating before people are forced to.
Excellent answers:-)
Sleep pods with ac and a setting to kill all bugs inside of them
I've been trying to warn people about the optimism trap for years. It's difficult, optimism is a very low-effort and attractive mentality.