I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.“
—Prof Lesley HughesWhen a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
The cause in both these statements is that global warming will NEVER be an immediate threat. Humans are wired for immediacy, and if the threat is not a right now thing, they switch to ignoring and adapting. Our psychology is wired to try to address the tiger and to adapt to what is unfortunately continual environmental collapse.
Those who understand we literally cannot do that and that a great many of us will die are not equipped to handle that information without simply sinking into increasingly immobile despair, because…what the fuck can I do about it?
I already eat little, don’t even own a car, my worst offense is having internet but it’s necessary for work. My other options are to become homeless again or Amish.
People in many countries are suffering greatly already from natural events that have been kicked up to 20. All I can do is watch. And I do. But more and more as someone who has a large stomach for suffering, even I’m beginning to evaluate what good it’s doing me, as a civilian, to watch.
I can’t help, or I would have. Whatever’s going to happen to me in the future is unavoidable. My choices then are between Despair and Not Despair. This is why the masses won’t pay attention. They don’t have the bandwidth for the entire planet.
The politicians, however, have no excuse for this, and had we less tendency to shut our eyes and stomp our feet and more biological ability to plan in long term, they would be on pikes in the 00’s.
Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
Unfortunately, at the risk of sounding defeatist, warning the public is pretty much a lost cause at this point. The ones that are receptive already know (and are seeing it first hand this summer), and the ones who aren’t have their heads so far up their own asses that they’re receiving AM radio. And realistically, there’s not much for the average person to do; it’s the industrial -scale operators that are the largest problem, and they’ll resort to murdering their opposition (both figuratively and literally) before giving up a cent of profit. We as a populace need to full on revolt and take back our health and planet, but we are so effectively convinced our enemies are our neighbors that I really am not sure what to do here.
there’s not much for the average person to do
Not individually, no. Collectively, even if we don’t have everyone, we can go pretty far and we did not too long ago, many times. This is what we should be advocating for, I don’t think there are any other alternatives at this point.
You gotta get the Rs in on it. For a while right and left was more of a friendly rivalry, albeit intense at times. Barring nazis and zealots they’re not all bad. You can see them peaking out every now and then. Tradesmen unionizing, adoption of solar panels, the simple acknowledgment of systemic corruption, the libertarians trying really hard to figure out how to run a country without a government(lol). They’re not all bad extremists. Though they do seem easily controlled by state.
When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
I think our situation is more like that of a decades long cigarette smoker. They know their habit is deadly, and know exactly what the remedy is, but most of them will smoke until they die or until it’s too late because quitting feels impossible. There are smokers that do quit though, everyday.
Don’t forget kids once we hit 130 were gonna start dropping like flies, going outside will be dangerous, your AC bill will be astronomical and the rich people will all be fine in their bunkers!
And water will be boiling
Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself wondering is this finally going to be the year when any doubts about the climate change crisis are blown away by a spate of costly climate extremes. That could be one benefit of 2023 being off the charts like this.
Narrator: it wasn’t
That’s the problem. Everyone knows it’s legit at this point. But there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in pretending it’s not. Then as COVID taught us 30 percent of people just don’t want to be told what to do so will say fuck you and do the opposite just to piss you off.
There’s about 1/3 of us, I call them the “idiot army”, Hillary called them “deplorable”. I think it’s just an artifact of the normal distribution of critical thinking skills and character traits like empathy.
I don’t believe these are “bad” people so much as easily taken advantage of and mislead (by the actual bad people) into being useful. I think one of the things MAGA has done is activated this group, that’s why I call them the “idiot army”, Republicans (e.g. Bannon) learned how to activate this group more effectively and explicitly than groups had in the past.
Some things act as human sieves and can be used to identify your victims (like how spam is geared to make the less gullible of us delete them but the more gullible might respond). If you’re a right wing political operative, these techniques can also be used to identify and manipulate those who could useful towards your goals.
You gotta think like an evil genius.
For us, we should realize that for this group, things are never going to click. Instead, we should be looking toward how we can thrive despite 1/3 of us being idiots. Identify techniques to prevent bad actors from using this 1/3 to gain power.
Yeah, I don’t understand why they can so peacefully ignore this like water wars are near to happen. When I say we need to find a solution on how to save water and keep it for emergency, their respond like “hell nah, still don’t happen today so I don’t care. Better buy fuckin Iphone 15 Pro Max just to piss you off because I have more money to buy it rather than invest save water solution for my family like you said”.
Better find people with “off-grid passionate” commune to prepare early before it start happening rather than discussing, debating, or doing nothing bout that.
Everyone knows it’s legit at this point
A Republican my team has been lobbying for like 6 years now has moved from “doubtful of climate change” to “climate change is occurring, but we don’t know for sure our impact” - so yes, things are slowly moving toward sanity.
Worth noting he drives an EV and has solar panels personally, and his public stance is 100% a reflection of his constituency and not his own views.
Did everyone see this? https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/far-right-climate-plans-00107498
I can’t wait! I hope they kill us all faster. How exciting.
Don’t look up
The super-shitification** by sold-out governments and the H U G E fossil fuel industry against 50+ years of scientific climate change warnings hasn’t forced any changes, it’s unlikely watching it play out will do anything. In fact all we’re seeing now is even more drilling operations beginning and even less care about the human cost.
At this point we can only hope for the best and prepare for the worst because we ain’t seen nothing yet.
** with apologies to Cory Doctorow
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…or maybe made a documentary about it 20 years ago…
Scientists have been warning us about manmade GHG causing climate change far before An Inconvenient Truth. But yeah, I’ll admit that documentary certainly shone a spotlight on the issue–at least, in the US it did.
Scientists have been warning about manmade ghg cashing climate change since the fucking 19th century. Not the 1900s, the fucking 1800s. Right around the time the fucking civil war happened scientists figured this shit would be a problem, and they couldn’t even imagine a fucking fraction of the shit we’ve got spewing carbon into the atmosphere.
That would have been convenient.
I really hope Tony Seba is right on his forecasts. It’s the only thing that brings more hope. Electric cars, solar, batteries and precision fermentation. He’s been right a lot so I have faith.
Having said that we need a huge carbon tax (including on trade) like today.
Sorry to burst the Tony Seba bubble, but he was wrong about self-driving electric cars and he is also wrong about batteries.
(Solar he is probably right on).
We only have two really big, proven guns in the fight against climate change: carbon tax (or, the power of the market) and atomic energy (or, the power of E=MC^2).
Everyone was wrong about self driving cars.
Any analysis out there about batteries?
Fission is just too expensive. Will never be the answer.
Fission is only expensive because we’re depending on the free market to develop and deploy it.
Basically, we cannot depend on capitalism to fix a problem that capitalism created.
I’ve seen fairly credible estimates that say when we finally max out the usable land for solar and wind, we’d be producing 30-40% of the world’s electricity via those two methods.
Which is a lot of power, but it falls short of the final goal. As a note, we just barely crossed 10% in 2022.
We need fission. It can power the world for the next 1000 years at current demand, and that’s including the power generated by solar and wind.
The problem is, regulatory sabotage has created a system where it’s more cost-effective to build the biggest nuclear plant possible. Except by building bigger, you drive up the costs more. Every part must be custom-built, which is expensive, most parts need special machinery to install, which is expensive, and then the constant frivolous lawsuits from people who don’t understand a damn thing about nuclear power, but have strong opinions are expensive.
Add in the fact that these lawsuits delay construction, which means that the regulations can then change mid-construction, which means you need to back-port everything to be compliant with the new regs, and now you have a massive project that’s been delayed a dozen times and had the final cost skyrocket, all because the current regulatory structure is such that every plant costs the same to license. And the licensing fees are pretty hefty.
So people taking the risk, build bigger, because the biggest plants can produce more power, which can then be sold to a wider market, and that means more profit in the long run. But again, big plants are fucking expensive.
The answer of course is a factory built small modular reactor. They can be slotted in place, run for 10 years, then shipped back to the manufacturer for refueling and refitting. And because they’re small, they literally cannot melt down. There’s not enough fuel to do so. Being modular, they can stack next to each other until you have the power needed, and they need the land equivalent of a corner gas station. All to produce more power than most solar farms.
But to really get the economies of scale, and drive that price down, you need a bunch of them to be ordered. Which puts up back in the realm of capitalism not being able to fix a problem that capitalism created. See, those first few units are going to be super expensive as the factory is built and tooled up, and no one wants to pay for that when they can just buy 1000 acres of land and throw a solar farm down.
Also, that licensing issue is still there. You have to pay a lot of money to open a nuclear plant, and that’s not even the insurance premiums.
Oh yeah, then there’s the waste issue, which is only an issue because we’re not actually allowed to burn the waste in a reactor. Because of regulatory sabotage again.
If we were allowed to reprocess and burn the waste, the remaining dangerous isotopes would last a couple hundred years, not the hundreds of thousands of unprocessed waste. We’d also shit ton more fuel power the world for a very long time.
Fission is only expensive because we’re depending on the free market to develop and deploy it.
Basically, we cannot depend on capitalism to fix a problem that capitalism created.
Well that’s just wrong. Capitalism makes things cheaper. Also fission has been built under communist countries so the point doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen fairly credible estimates that say when we finally max out the usable land for solar and wind, we’d be producing 30-40% of the world’s electricity via those two methods.
That’s just bull crap. Even some back of the envelope calculations can prove that. Go look up some solar farms and wind farms. Calculate the power to area ratio then extrapolate.
You have a very wrong opinion of how capitalism work. Even way before Henry Ford economies of scale have been a thing. The fact is nuclear power large or small doesn’t make much money. Also profit maximisation is also cost minimisation, it’s two sides of the same coin. Again a country like China could mass produce small reactors even just for themselves, but do they? No they are mass producing solar and wind because it’s more economical. None of the arguments you have made in anyway stop China (who know how to build small reactors) wouldn’t do this.
The French also built a bunch of cheap reactors by building the same design. But that paradigm is not as common as it should be. Every Reactor in the US is a custom design.
Capitalism, goes with the cheapest option, even if it’s not the best. Except that’s not actually how it works, It actually goes with the option that makes the most money, regardless of who it hurts. That’s the capitalism I know and hate.
Capitalism is why oil companies still exist.
China is building wind and solar farms, but they also rank third in the world for number of nuclear power capacity, and are building more plants. They have 22 plants under construction right now, and a further 70 are in development.
So yeah, a state controlled economy can do it quite easily, capitalism cannot.
The issue with the capitalist approach is called a bootstrapping paradox. You need to sell the thing to develop the thing, and you can’t sell it without first developing it. Literally needing to reach down, grab your own boot straps, and lift yourself up.
Well of course you can build them when price is no concern.
But when price matters nuclear is too expensive.
Again, capitalism cannot fix the problems created by capitalism.
And you better believe that the factories that pump out solar cells and wind turbines were initially built with government money.
The federal government has been throwing money at solar and wind projects. And these days it pays off, but in the early days, it did not. Wind was particularly expensive for the power generated for about 5-10 years. And then more factories came online and the price rapidly fell.
The same crowd that told us to wait for wind to become viable, screams that nuclear is too expensive and should get no government money at all.
That same crowd often sues new nuclear power projects, driving up the cost further. All because they are fucking idiots who want fossil fuels to win.
See, that’s the dirty little secret. Every wind and solar farm needs a backup power source for when they’re offline. And that backup is always natural gas.
Those natural gas peaker plants are being built at a breakneck pace. All because solar and wind get priority on the grid. And then when they fall off, you need a near instant ramp up of power, which only natural gas can provide.
Batteries that can handle the load don’t actually exist yet, and likely require more investment than it would take to get a small modular reactor factory going full steam.
capitalism makes things cheaper
Except when it doesn’t lol
Man that’s environmental scientists catch phrase lately, “No one wants to be right about this.” I really wish people(cough governments) would take them seriously.
You forgot about ‘faster than expected’.
@btaf45 We. Are. PHUCKED.
Hey when Doomers feel this way, do you guys also like, not invest in 401(k)s and shit?
Cuz I’d love my kids to have an easier transition up the economic ladder when the world does not, in fact, end.
Edit: this is a serious question. Do you contribute to your 401(k)? Have an IRA?
