Figures and previews from the forthcoming IPCC AR6 (due out in July) are starting to come out. They're not looking great. Limiting warming to 2 degrees C or less is now virtually impossible, as even the most optimistic net carbon zero projections put us at 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100. More realistic target is now in the 2.5-3.5 degrees of warming range, which is likely to be extremely bad for a lot of people.

The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an "immediate and radical transformation" of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.

  • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
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    4 years ago

    Watching how the world has responded to COVID has made me much more pessimistic about our chances of solving the climate crisis. Both scientists and activists have long assumed that most people would come around to the right beliefs as soon as their own communities started being impacted, and as soon as people they knew and loved started dying in climate-related catastrophes. I think one of the lessons of COVID is that this is a very dangerous and wrong assumption

    Partly because no one truly agitates and tells them that the deaths of their friends were brought about by the government. The media and the ruling class managed to turn getting covid into an "irresponsible" act, with covid as a result of parties and not jobs that refused to enact safety measures. But a lot of the people that have died throughout this entire pandemic have been service, warehouse workers, grocers, first responders, and old people.

      • marxisthayaca [he/him,they/them]
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        4 years ago

        The government has passed some measures protecting those companies . And those kind of lawsuits depend on the National Labor Relation Board. There's actually rumblings of the government merging all amazon-related suits into one, single investigation from the sheer quantity of them.