WTF Climate Change News

[Beebo Brink]

Even if we could mitigate it with drastic measures, there is basically no political will to do anything.

The issue goes far beyond "political will". Just look back a few years to the Covid pandemic and how so many people refused to wear masks, a minor inconvenience. Now imagine those same people being asked (or told) to suffer major restrictions and economic disruptions, despite the fact they will never live long enough to see the results of their sacrifice.

When people say they are concerned about climate change and want their government to do something, most of them want that action to happen offstage. They want to keep living their lives the same way as ever but have climate change just go away. And they expect that to happen within a matter of years, not millennia.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

...suffer major restrictions and economic disruptions, despite the fact they will never live long enough to see the results of their sacrifice.

Yes. And to build on this, there is also kind of a big game theory issue of "Why should we suffer to lower carbon emissions if the rest of the world won't and it still happens?" The fact the whole world would need to be mostly in on it also played a role in killing good climate policies almost everywhere. I heard a lot of people say action was pointless because they pollute more in China anyway! I heard that from Americans and Europeans.

In summary, people have a lot of excuses for doing nothing!

 

[Beebo Brink]

The fact the whole world would need to be mostly in on it also played a role in killing good climate policies almost everywhere.

There are no "good climate policies" anywhere, because a truly substantive climate policy is financially ruinous to the population of that country. At best, we have "performative climate policies" that make us feel better and slow things down by a few milliseconds while continuing an unlimited growth trajectory that accelerates our damage (hello data centers).

In order to make a truly substantive difference, we would need to completely reorganize society and our infrastructure. We would need to rebuild from the ground up, and that very process would require carbon emissions that got us in this fix to begin with. Not to mention that it would take too much time to do, even if it was the number one priority of society. The resource usage and cost would be beyond the ability of our financial systems to fund. And we should have done all this in the 1970s.

There is no practical solution that can fix this for us. We can't even manage a solution that stalls and gives us a little more time, and we're doing shit for mitigation strategies to just survive where we're going. We're just going to ride this train until it falls off a cliff.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

There are no "good climate policies" anywhere...

Hey now, don't forget about Bhutan! ...but yes, in general I agree there was never any chance of any industrial country doing nearly enough. The most "radical" suggested by various governments were still generally not enough.

 

[Free]

Joy...

Climate Change Is Creating a New Kind of Weather Disaster

Researchers are pushing for more aggressive emissions reductions to minimize the threat of concurrent extreme weather events.

gizmodo.com

In 2022, the combined impact of devastating floods and a severe heatwave caused over $40 billion of damage and killed more than 1,700 people across Pakistan. The catastrophe was an example of a compound extreme weather event—when multiple natural disasters unfold at the same time. According to a new study, they’re going to become more common.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

USDA projects smallest wheat harvest since 1972 due to plains drought