"For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it's five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we'd expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years.
[...]
She fears a further change in the balance could trigger a tipping point from where it's difficult to reverse the trajectory. "We might end up in a new state," she said. "That would be quite concerning to the sustainability of human conditions on Earth, I suspect.
Nah. Everyone currently alive was born after the machinery of climate change was already set in motion. I don't think even the ruling class "wanted" this to happen because it threatens their comfortable lives as well. They just wanted infinite growth on a finite planet, because they're delusional and their ideology is on autopilot. That's not the same as wanting climate change, because wanting climate change at least acknowledges it as a real thing that is happening.
I think what happened is that generalized commodity production, industrialization, colonialism, and imperialism came together to create the perfect storm of irreversible climate change. After all, the only way for the imperial periphery, that is, the "third world" to get the boot of the imperial core ("first world") off of its neck, is to industrialize, build up arsenals of nuclear and conventional weapons, etc, and defend themselves from imperialism. But in the process of building up the productive forces and the means to defend themselves, they become part of what is driving climate change. What is driving climate change is an arms race of wasteful overproduction for the sake of "self defense" between nations that view each other as threats. We're in a global prisoner dilemma where every party has a short term incentive to ignore the long term problem. In a situation like that, individuals can go against the grain, but it has not yet been statistically enough to reverse the general course of things.
If you and I went out tomorrow and threw literally every fossil fuel executive down a mineshaft, it would not change the general character of production as a whole, nor would it change the global transportation networks that are already in place and hooked on fossil fuels. Nor would it stop the generalized process of extraction, production, and pollution that drives climate change.
Yeah but it'd make me feel better (speaking entirely hypothetically).
Nobody here is saying you shouldn’t do it anyway (hypothetically)
but of course
I think part of the problem is that the chain of societies we've built is plain too complex for anyone to really keep under control or even effectively coordinate, too. Even by the people who think they grasp enough of it to get a rein on it. At scale, a lot of systems take on lives of their own.
The scariest version of world leadership is a lack of it. And we're living that.
It's a bunch of rich assholes convinced of their own genius all picking apart what's left of global infrastructure to build their little piles of vanity, all expecting handlers to fix things that they continue to break.