“We’re past the tipping point for the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies (…) Even if somehow, magically, we’re able to stop global warming tomorrow and return the atmosphere to more normal CO2 concentrations, we would lose most of the Rockies’ glaciers.”
…
“We might have a 20-year window of this much water and then it will start to fall off a cliff,” he says. “How much water is flowing through the river as a function of that time of year is going to start changing remarkably.”
…
“It’s sort of become a catchment for contaminants,” says Criscitiello. Legacy contaminants like DDT are starting to melt out of the snowpack, she says. “This has become a concern.”
:doomjak:
It's telling that the bloomer narrative (embodied by, say, the actively harmful Kurzgesagt) has changed to "Look how good a job slowing the inevitable we've done! Only a billion people are guaranteed to die!"
One billion people when asked if they consent to be sacrificed: [a desert of human skeletons that can't answer because they died]
I swear if we stopped all the production of all the dumb shit of modern life we would still be screwed. some thing of the modern age we would probably want to keep but we could stop producing 99% of the things we currently do and still would be okay. The world would be better for it and the global south would be too.
It can’t just be stopping extraction and needlessly production. Global warming requires more than stopping the emission of C02 but the active reversal of it. We gotta go fully Solarpunk and plant a zillion trees and stuff if we want to live. We must repair the damage we have done.
Clean energy for healthcare and refrigeration everyone else needs to return to monke
Watched a vid recently on how tree planting is another victim of the system and essentially will not work and make it worse.
Planting a trillion trees will be done by the winning bidders, who will plant the cheapest trees they can in the cheapest places they can. This will lead to monocultures, invasive species, and destruction of grass and wetlands. Not every place ought to be a forrest. And grasslands have more species varriety and an overall larger carbon sink than trees. Especially when a lot of the tree planting projects will be harvested in 20-40 years, and ultimatly made into shit that will be landfill.
The best solution is the leave the land alone. Let nature take it over and never touch it in the future.
Even things like "green" skyscrapers that have trees and other greenery on it, are not as green as we'd like to claim. More concrete and rebarb to handle the added weight, and more maintenance challenge any benefits. Is it better than nothing? Sorta. But better insulation, better glass, and better ventilation would all be a more worthwhile investment.
We need to radically change our ways of life and expansion. Planting trees doesn't stop 100 companies responsible for >70% of emissions. Planting trees doesn't stop landfills. But they want you to think it will.
Very true, that’s why I used the term “Solarpunk” which calls for radical re-greening of spaces. Planrs, trees, flowers, bugs, soil, all that good real ecological restoration stuff. I used Solarpunk as a sort of short-hand rhetorical device as it’s rooted in utopian leftist reorganization. I do however think you’re totally right that without real-ass dismantling the existing system no real change can come about, and no about of “greenwashing” will even begin to remotely address the issues we face.
The other dirty secret of those tree-planting initiatives is that they just have to plant the tree for the credit, it doesn't actually have to mature; tons of those carbon offset trees just get dug up almost immediately after planting (and long before they can sequester anything).
It'd be more benificial to turn these areas into protected parks and not touch them at all. Obviously there are easy things to do muni wise, ban lawns to some extent lol (push for local flowers and plants, clover ect), add more green space, promote tree planting and dissway tree cutting for the most part.
But yeah capitalism can't fix capitalism.
I remember my parents taking me up to see one of these when I was a very young child, not old enough to remember which one or really much else from that age, not old enough to really understand beauty and what it was or even what I was looking at, but even then I was struck by how beautiful it was. It was probably my first real moment of awe
I'll never be able to see them like that again, I might not ever be able to see them again, I definitely won't be able to give that experience to my kids
And outside of those frankly selfish urges, how many people will die in the floods? How many displaced? The deposition of soil in the rivers from last year's flooding/glacial melt combo severely threatened the salmon spawn, how much of a ripple effect from this can the ecosystem actually take??
Frankly, this is war. One side, the side perpetrating it, knows this. Doomsday bunkers, the escape to space, the push for population control, they're already planning for it. The other refuses to believe it's a war, we close our eyes and pray to the other side to stop fighting while actively denouncing the few who fight back. When has that stopped any war? When has that not resulted in anything but the deaths of the people praying? They're killing us and we're laying down and taking it, thanking them for crushing us under their boot, while insisting that they know best and will stop the problem they're incentivized to create.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I had to get it out or I would have just started screaming
When I was around 5 years old, I was fucking around in my room doing kid stuff and my dad came up and asked, "Hey, wanna take a trip to the top of the Twin Towers?"
I said nah as I spun in circles on an old office chair. Even at 5 I logic-ed that there'd be plenty of opportunity, its not like they'd go anywhere.
Guess what happened when I was 6.
I had a very similar experience lol. I was reading a book about NYC when I was 5, and was really amazed by the twin towers, and I told my parents I really wanted to go see them one day.
And then like a month before I turned 6, the thing happened
we are going to fucking die because of this system i hate it i hate it
Ah, but you're forgetting that he's also approved an oil extraction project off the coast of Newfoundland that will start after 2028... hold on a second, I'm beginning to think that the Liberals might not actually care about the environment!
A....at least we let poor porky and the mindless horde of consooooomers have their precious "freedumz", right?
Ok time to start spraying the atmospheric sulfur dioxide let's get on it can't make this any worse, roll the dice
Either that or pray to volcano god Pele for intercession
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age_volcanism https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/get-ready-for-more-volcanic-eruptions-as-the-planet-warms/
I hadn't heard about that concept before, but it does seem like our best option right now, short of some technology to pull carbon out of the atmosphere on a mass scale.
And it says the yearly cost would be less than a quarter of the $40 billion we just sent to Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection
Lol I have been meaning to watch that, I've heard it's good.
One of the things I find interesting about it is that it seems like the particles would only stay in the atmosphere for a few years, hence the need to continually spray. But hypothetically that would mean we could have some level of control over it, with a relatively short delay of a few years for changes to take effect. So if it's way too much cooling, we cut back, and in 5-10 years tops it's at a good level again. Obviously fucking up the world for 5-10 years isn't a positive thing lol, but I'd say 10-20 years of fine tuning is better than just slowly letting the world die like we're doing now
:so-true: Surely the solution is to let capitalists put more shit into the atmosphere to keep the treadmill going just a little longer while we definitely stop the fossil fuels, pinky promise.
Lol as much as I think it's probably what would need to be done as a stop-gap while we get emissions down, I feel like that's exactly what would happen if this was actually done under our current system.
"Great, the warming is fixed, now we don't have to worry about emissions at all anymore ever!"
All geo-engineering under capitalism (and, more spicily, under a hypothetical industrial communism) is tech-saviorism and will be bought and wholly owned by the Gates Foundation or local equivalent for the express purpose of keeping the coal mines and oil wells going.
Oh yeah, I fully agree. I don't think any meaningful change is going to happen, in the US especially, until states start to collapse from climate crises anyway, so any actual positive geo-engineering probably wouldn't happen unless some kind of hypothetical post-collapse communist state has the ability to do it. I also won't be surprised if we just kick the can down the road with something like this eventually, and make the problem worse in the long term by acidifying the atmosphere for decades or centuries. I'd hope that an industrial communist state would fix it in the long term, but it's all hypotheticals from here anyway.
I try not to be a doomer as much as I can help it, but now truly is the time of monsters.
Mayor Secretary Pete was heard to quip: "The situation for the Rockies is much like what I said about babies. If the Rockies and babies want to survive they need to make lifestyle changes in an evolving world. That's not the government's job. And- oh, I must go. I do not want to be late for my daily adrenochrome session."
Didn't all of BC end up on fire and underwater within a 4 month stretch last year?
Boomers: "Just go live in the woods if you don't like it. Or maybe ascend to godhood and make your own planet!"
maybe ascend to godhood and make your own planet!
Nah, the Mormons retconned their religion again and now you don't get a planet when you die.
Boomers: Millennials have no respect for our legacy contaminants
