Dismaying to see the reactions to this range from denial to complacency to wishful thinking.
Climate forcing has such momentum that it takes two decades for the full impact of emissions to be felt and many more for cascading impacts. The fires we're seeing? The droughts? The floods? That's from emissions from the early 2000s, before China and India embarked on rapid industrialization and growth of energy use, especially coal.
This isn't the apocalypse either. It's just something of a scale we've never faced in human records, like what the Mayans faced at the end of their civilization but global.
Do you have a rabbit hole entry point for the downfall of the Mayan civilization, specifically the climate factors? It's a civilization and series of events I know little about but is fascinating.
The end of the Classic period? Sure. The 200 year drought did not help by reducing agricultural capacity and the political upheaval tanked any ability to adapt of much of the cities.
But it was the resulting warfare from all that that really fucked then up.
But post-classical Mayan civilization was still healthy and large in scale. Just not the same kind of thing.
It would be a mistake to say their civilization ended then. It simply changed.
The Spanish killed it though. Killed it so systematically it became myth for centuries
Hm, I don't see the similarity then. The Spanish were deliberate and malicious. Climate change is a consequence of our own actions, although the accounting needs work.
How many predictions of "catastrophic climate change" have actually come true in the past few decades? Some of us have lived long enough to realise the truth.
MANY. This is the most annoying case of confirmation bias.
Climatologists make predictions in terms of probabilities. “If emissions go up X amount then we will see Y increase in likelihood of impact Z”. They can’t predict a specific future. Our climate is a single instantiation of many possible climates, and climate prediction is a matter of characterizing the possibilities.
The vast majority of predictions from actual climatologists has/is occurring. From increasing mean temperatures, to increasing hurricane intensity and frequency, to marine life impacts (eg Maine lobsters are migrating so far north they won’t be Maine lobsters soon), to decreasing sea ice, to innumerable ecological impacts. ALL of that was predicted. Accurate temperature predictions go back 150 years.
They can’t predict “sea ice will diminish to exactly this amount by year 2023,” they make probabilistic statements about how mean sea ice will decline per decade. They can’t say “in year 2040 all the lobsters will be gone,” they say the mean lobster population will migrate north to cooler water.
I assume you heard a few reporters make specific claims about a hurricane hitting your town or something, but they missed the point. Maybe you watched too many fictional movies. That line of reasoning is utter propaganda that you’re spreading. It’s antiscientific, unsubstantiated lies.
No one under the age of 40 has seen a record low month. The number if record highs continue to increase, year over year. The number of record lows continues to decrease, year over year. Average humidity increases year over year as the oceans warm.
And the oceans are warming as well.
The climate models Exxon ran in the 1980s predicting widespread warming were frighteningly accurate.
The only way you can rationally argue with the numbers is to provide measurements which indicate the opposite. But you can’t, so you question the motives of those who chose wisdom over polemics.
Up here in the Canada we see record lows too. But we also see record highs. The instability of the jet stream makes both our extremes more so, and we get hit with the bad conditions on both ends.
Yes, some of us have lived long enough to realize the truth; The truth is that those scientists decades ago who warned us all about exactly the things we see in the news daily these days were right then, and still right today. We should have taken action then instead of wasting decades allowing the problem to get so far out of control.
Not many. We’ve consistently overshoot worst case predictions.
Many of the heat waves, hurricanes and first fires we’ve seen weren’t predicted to occur until 2030s.
People in North America and Europe of course enjoy the best climate and see the effects the slowest from climate change.
One way to accurately judge climate change is to count the number and frequency of extreme events. How many 100 year weather events have you seen? How many 500 or 1000 year weather events have you seen? How many once in human history, like the drought in China have you lived through?
The fact that North America and Europe enjoy the best climate is predicated on the Gulf Stream and the Jet Stream. Given that climate change may destabilize both, both Europe and North America may experience the effects from climate change very quickly.
Climate forcing has such momentum that it takes two decades for the full impact of emissions to be felt and many more for cascading impacts. The fires we're seeing? The droughts? The floods? That's from emissions from the early 2000s, before China and India embarked on rapid industrialization and growth of energy use, especially coal.
This isn't the apocalypse either. It's just something of a scale we've never faced in human records, like what the Mayans faced at the end of their civilization but global.