this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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Honestly I am of the opinion that climate change is far less of an existential threat to humanity than mutually assured destruction was. Ecosystems are gonna collapse and lots of people are going to die. I think the true climate change doomer pill isn't that it's too late and the world is doomed, it's that the people living in the global north will not make the sacrifices needed to stop the climate catastrophes that will happen in the global south. We could all go vegan tomorrow and cause the largest single decrease in greenhouse emissions. We could all stop buying products that are made unsustainably and unethically in countries that are supposedly no longer colonised. But we won't. No one will pay higher prices for the same products. No one will make an effort to change their lifestyle. And no one will care that other people, far away, will die because of it. Entire cultures will be erased and we will not lose sleep over knowing that we let it happen because it was easier than doing something about it.
Actually there is a serious risk that Earth turns into Venus. Perpetually self-reinforcing green house effect. All life on Earth, fried, for all eternity.
Edit: Well, until the sun blows.
Isn't the carbon were releasing now from fossil fuels carbon that used to be in the atmosphere? What self reinforcing mechanisms will allow for temperatures roughly beyond what has already occurred, which still sustained life?
Briefly, they're wrong. I responded in detail above.
You are correct, what we're burning as fossil fuels is largely the remains of millions of years of vegetative and microbial life, altered due to heat, pressure, and time. Millions of years of time.
All that carbon making up those organisms was fixed from the atmosphere. While biological functions have been busy fixing CO2, volcanoes, the Earth's mantle, and even some geochemical processes release CO2. If not for biological fixation, the atmosphere's CO2 content would be higher.