One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,” scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.
“Over the past year, we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever.”
If you were mathmatically certain we were all going to die as a result of their actions, would your opinion still be the same?
I suppose I am more pessimistic when I look at graphs. It’s not even about the most blatant damage, a lot of my concerns is based on the damage we aren’t measuring. I think the game is over and we lost.
The pessimism is fair. I think the difference isn’t simply if we’re going to succumb to extinction, but also when and how. I’m going to die one day, regardless of climate change. If I have more money, I can extend that time and reduce suffering. The same can be said for humanity.
For example, we’re very likely to face food supply constrains first. Since most food corporations turn their profits into shareholder value, they won’t have the means necessary to combat the inevitable climate obstacles, and will immediately turn to governments for assistance. The same can be said for insurance corporations and coastal residents or those in wildfire zones.
you’re writing, on the one hand, “it’s not about revenge”
and i’m writing, on the other, that these oil-executives could make “moloch happy with a feast”
(i am not advocating for that specifically, but i am saying others could advocate for that)
in a way, I think we are actually saying the same thing, only you’re saying it in terms of civil judgments and i’m saying it in terms of large hot statues of moloch filled with oil executives.
what if it’s not 300 years until human extinction? what if it’s 30?
Would you still be so civil?
Perhaps the scientists lighting themselves on fire to try to get us to notice the problem weren’t protesting in a calm civil nice manner because it’s really that bad.
What if we aren’t saying the same thing? What if you are part of the problem with your civility?
My civility can successfully reappropriate funds. Your oil boiling will only pass the funds to their beneficiaries and land you in prison.
Beneficiaries? Reappropriation?
Although I appreciate all these big words, I am trying to point out that collapse could occur much sooner than we all realize.
I am not actually suggesting “oil boiling,” I was using the idea of a hot statue of moloch filled with oil executives as a allagorical simile and metaphor for people being upset.
My point is, civility may become more blatantly meaningless when the biosphere becomes more visibly in a state of complete collapse, and then all the buddhism and jesusism and sitting under a tree or behind desks and calmly talking about words isn’t going to undo a collapsed biosphere.
I get how jesusism and civil complaints and erudishun have a place in society, but many people may care about those things less when the biosphere reaches a tipping point and the collapse becomes undeniable.
You are saying the normal liberal socially acceptable thing, let’s have civil respectable accountability and change the future. But in the future, with a biosphere collapse, it may not be the normal thing to say. I’m sure when the new tropes come, you’ll be ready.
(Which is exactly when someone… not me… rolls in a giant metal hollow statue of moloch, conveniently on a pair of wheels… ready as a symbol… of accepting the future)