• kinther@lemmy.worldOP
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    10 months ago

    I know this isn’t politics or nation state news, but it is deeply troubling for all of us who live on planet Earth. Six standard deviations is mind boggling.

    Mods, please remove this if you feel it isn’t news worthy. I know it breaks rule 1, but wanted to share.

  • Jumi@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I don’t have a car and I’m separating my trash but it doesn’t seem to do anything

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      10 months ago

      It’s my fault, I forgot to turn off the tap while brushing my teeth yesterday.

      Sorry everyone.

    • Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I’m sorry I forget the source, but I once read something from a scientist that in your entire life, if you reuse/recycle/protect the environment,etc for your own single entire life, you will have starved off climate change for 1 whole second. Mind boggling to know your entire existence comes down to that litter of a difference. The point of what I remember reading was not that individuals are the problem, but that corporations and big industries were the worst offenders doing little to help change.

      • Limit@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        I mean if every single person on earth did this, it would equate to about 253 years. (8 billion seconds is about 253.68 years) combine that with other efforts could really make a difference. Granted this is a hypothetical number and there are far more factors at play, it’s obviously not as simple as each person doing this = 1 second saved, but just throwing out there that there are a lot of people on earth…

        It is still worth it to recycle, reduce, don’t be wasteful, eat less meat, all those things.

        • mansfield@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          The idea that doing little things yourself adds up to much bigger and more cumulative impacts is lost on most people. Instead they tend to fixate on the idea that if no one else is (visibly-to-them) making sacrifices, and my own personal effort is so small, why should I bother?

      • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I like your optimism, but this is a sinking ship… I support not having a car and recicling though

        • Deceptichum@kbin.social
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          10 months ago

          Oh no that was sarcasm.

          You won’t change shit doing those things, you need to go arrest a CEO or something to start making some changes.

          • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Oh good, I was worried there were individual lifestyle changes that would be helpful but inconvenient or expensive for me. Knowing there’s nothing I can do individually makes me feel much better about doing nothing. Thanks, internet stranger!

    • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The trash bit is better solved by not buying stuff in the first place (reduce).

      Personal emissions exist, but are small. They add up when multiplied by millions or billions.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      The company I work for uses gigantic barrels of oil to lubricate our AC motors. We’re one company in North America out of thousands. There isn’t anything you can do.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Lubricating oil isn’t quite so bad (extracting and refining is bad, but so too for a lot of minerals).

        Breaking up the hydrocarbons leaking CO2 is a big problem, as is leaking methane.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

      You’ve taken some right steps, but there’s still s long way to go. Various industries, companies and individuals do what makes economic sense to them. Governments decide what makes sense and what doesn’t, but you can influence that by voting.

      For example, many industries have used coal and gas, because it made economic sense at the time. Now that emissions trading is in place, using polluting energy sources is less and less appealing. The same sort of shift should take place in other areas as well, and politics is the way to get there. Climate change isn’t a technological problem as much as it’s a political one.

  • filister@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    These are rookie numbers, now make it to 10 sigmas. But seriously, the biggest problem is that global warming is happening very slowly (in human years) and we are kind of normalising it and concentrating on more pressing topics.

    I guess our kids or grand kids will read in their history books about our ignorance and scratch their heads wondering how stupid we might have been to allow all this to happen. And they will be absolutely right of course.

    We are more concerned about our well being and our consumerism while wanting bigger cars, bigger toys, share prices etc. instead of trying to lead a sustainable life.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      We’re fifty years into this. You might be new. Nothing changes except the right-wing’s hypocrisy and idiocy. Nothing. Changes.

      • okamiueru@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Indeed. It’s depressing growing up, and the only thing that changes is the severity of the prognosis. We still travel around the world because we’re bored. Hours long roundtrip flights are sold at 20-30 USD, probably because of tourism subsidies. Not to mention the many business trips just to “meet in person”.

        We have all this technology to work from home, to reduce our footprint. But, we don’t give a fuck. And this is just travel. Capitalism needs to be curtailed to factor in the long term destruction of the planet, or we’ll head there as fast as profit margins allows.

    • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      A world that lets this happen is a world that won’t have history books in the future, or accurate ones at least

      • Zron@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I often wonder where we’ll be in 2000 years.

        Will our descendants look open our great works like how we’ve looked at Roman works, in awe of what we achieved with “primitive” tools. Or will they look at it in awe due to not having any understanding of how such a thing was done at all.

        Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself, or will we be back to city states, warring over scraps of land and access to water that is slightly less polluted. Or will it be both? The rich with their space empires and the poor left to fend for themselves amongst the corruption.

        Will there be any of us left at all? We could wipe out all human life right now with a bio weapon or nuclear war. We’re like children playing with their Father’s gun, maybe nothing bad happens and we put it back where we found it, or maybe it’s going to be a tragedy. We’ve only had these tools for barely a century, who knows what we’ll do in 20 of those.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          10 months ago

          Will we have colonized the solar system and left earth to stabilize itself

          Definitely not that. Any technology that would allow us to colonize other planets would be much easier to use on Earth no matter how bad it gets.

          • Zron@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            It can also be argued that the continued trend of having an increasing human population is only going to keep accelerating the decline of earth’s biosphere.

            We’re already seeing an apocalypse in the insects, and that’s going to lead to a decline in plant life.

            Our carbon emissions are rapidly increasing ocean acidity and temperature, which will kill off huge swaths of the planktons that produce much of the oxygen we breathe. Biodiversity is approaching mass extinction level lows, and we’re barely figuring out how to slow it down.

            I’m sure life on earth will survive it, it survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and that was an incredibly rapid change. But human civilization as we know it may not be able to adapt quickly enough to the damage we’ve done.

            Humanity may end up as mole people living in carefully life support controlled bunkers if we continue. If earth is nearly as inhospitable to large terrestrial life as mars, what’s the benefit to one over the other? Might as well just leave the earth to the million year process of fixing itself and expand outwards if we can.

            • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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              10 months ago

              Earth still has plenty of benefits:

              • Things will grow outdoors, even if they’re not the things we want growing.
              • We already know where major deposits of natural resources are.
              • There’s an ionosphere, meaning the surface isn’t bathed in deadly radiation.
              • Parts of it, such as the poles, will likely remain habitable.

              The big issue, though, is that transporting any substantial number people to Mars would require many trillions of dollars of investments in space transportation. It’s just not feasible to ship a large number of people to another planet. Even if we could start a colony on Mars, most of humanity will still be stuck on Earth and they won’t have much interest in supporting a colony on another planet if they’re being left to die.

            • jj4211@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              The thing is that even with catastrophic global warming, earth would still be tons more habitable than Mars. Any structure that could allow survival on Mars would also allow survival on this hypothetical future earth.

              We either fix it or we are screwed. So we are probably screwed. Anyone seeking to build a Mars colony as an “escape” would probably fare better building similar stuff in earth deserts, or something somewhat different underwater. Still not the most sane places to go for, but more sane than Mars if the goal is “most survivability”.

        • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I read/watch high fantasy about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, year old dynasties, let alone civilizations, and it just doesn’t even make sense to me. We can barely keep a world system in place for a few decades.

      • filister@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Are today’s history books accurate? History has been used for ages to fuel the country’s propaganda and are rarely if ever critical to some shameful moments of one’s history.

        There are some exceptions but they are rather rare I would say.

        • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          History has always been written by the victors. Next time there might not be anyone alive to write it tho.

  • FilthyShrooms@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Hey, you know that tipping point that everyone was talking about? Yea I think we’ve passed that

  • forksandspoons@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    There was a hank green video about this a year back. Video link here, the tldr was that container ships used to use a type of fuel that was both bad for the environment but also really good at cloud seeding. More clouds shielded the oceans surface from the sun, artificially reducing its temperature. But in 2020 regulations made container ships move to a fuel that didnt seed clouds as much, so fewer clouds, higher temperature.

    So i guess one potential take away from that, if its right, is that the temperatures are not “suddenly” getting worse, but rather have been artificially depressed and we are only now going to what it should be.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I kinda feel like we hit the point where its either our global production infrastructure or our species seeing this graph.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        If we keep going? Brother, the flag-wavers are waving their jesus-hands in the air as we speak to keep it going. Right-wing ‘conservative’ victories guarantee planetary destruction, and we’re all watching it happen.

        Load up on guns, bring your friends!

      • canihasaccount@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I haven’t heard of any ultra-rich person who wants to reduce the population. A population decline will lead to stock price declines as the majority of the population ages (automated 401k investments buy and thus increase stock prices, withdrawals from 401k sell and thus decrease stock prices; an older population means less investment and greater withdrawal). Do you have a source for your decrease surplus population claim?

      • paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 months ago

        STOP DOOMER POSTING I know climate change is a frustrating problem to solve (to say the least) but holy shit this doomer posting makes it so hard to keep up the momentum necessary to solve it

        It is NOT already too late

        The way the climate change works, it won’t be too late until we’re all dead

        Stop Doomer Posting

        • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Oh ok, so you acknowledge that humanity’s footprint needs to be systematically drastically reduced for the next several generations until we reach a number this planet can sustainably support, and we need to push to end the capitalist global economy that requires infinite growth/metastasis on a finite world with finite resources immediately, in favor of an economic model that revolves around homeostasis/equilibrium, which will require necessary draconian lifestyle changes on all of our parts, right?

          For the record, I’m more than willing to. I’m hilariously outnumbered though.

          Now go ahead and talk about “baby steps” in the face of accelerating temperature increases. Baby steps are steps that could have made an impact that reverberated into today’s consequences half a century ago when we knew about climate change but largely pretended we didn’t.

          You call it doomerism, but I just don’t believe in self-deception to feel better.

          • Nudding@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            We have entered into the flickering phase of many earth systems. Being a realist isn’t doomerism.

        • CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          So if like 95% dies and all the production, transportation, unnecesary consumption etc, it will normalize and we get a do over?

          • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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            10 months ago

            humanity might, yeah. while they would be starting from a less advanced position they would have access to the knowledge we earn over centuries so it wouldn’t take as long to get back to where we are now, with the benefit of hindsight this time

  • Might Be@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is not a news article, it’s a picture of a graph.

    In the interest of discussion here, I’ll leave it up this time.

    Please report this to us earlier, or, if you think our rule about articles only is unfair, I would like to hear your thoughts on if this should be allowed in the future.

    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Id like to see documemtation for graphs that are quantifying something or apealing to emotion deeper than a meme.

  • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    HELP US

    A lot of us want to make change but a lot of people are trying to stop it…

    God, Gods, someone!

    ^help…

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Hurricane season is going to be a fucking rollercoaster.

      Some of You Guys are Alright, Don’t go to Florida next Autumn.

      • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Writing to politicians that cover my area. Actively recycling and reusing things. Trying to control my personal footprint. Pushing for and using electric when possible or simply avoiding gas use.

        I’m not sure what else I can do to make a more significant impact. I have thought about it for a while and I always come to the same conclusion that mega corporations and the like, should have accountability for what they create, rather than push it to the consumers who purchase.

        Sun chips used to use biodegradable bags but stopped due to complaints of noise? I never experienced it so I’m not sure. But seems dumb.

        As with any heavy lifting, a team makes the workload easier. Unsure how to press everyone to come together as we did with the ozone layer.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Recorded history = a period of 12 years in this case? The phrasing is confusing to me.

    • kinther@lemmy.worldOP
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      10 months ago

      Yes, that’s correct. We have not had the technology to accurately track this kind of data until 1982. Essentially the ~30 years of data from 1982-2011 is being used as a baseline. The past ~12 years or so have seen increasing levels of warmth compared to this baseline, and 6 standard deviations in statistics is usually “where did I fuck up my calculations” levels of absurdity. I think it is something like 1 in 500 million odds? I may be wrong, but it happening twice is not a miscalculation.

      We could chalk it up to this being a natural phenomenon, but it’s more likely that we have reached tipping points in the climate that are now being seen in the data.

      • markr@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        And while we don’t have the data it is very reasonable to assume that if we did have data going back 150 years the results would be stunningly worse.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Which is what we “knew” in the 70s. Yay we’re more accurate in counting, but the solutions are exactly the same now as they have always been. Renewables, less poison, better infrastructure. All of which are violently opposed by one of the political parties.