Comment by jacobgold
19 hours ago
You might try spending some time reading predictions of doom and gloom from the past. It should be very reassuring.
19 hours ago
You might try spending some time reading predictions of doom and gloom from the past. It should be very reassuring.
In not talking about baseless predictions. I'm talking about science. This is not speculation, it's not a possible future scenario, this is the world we currently live in and the trajectory we know for a fact that it is taking. We're setting heat records literally every year. All over the world. The polar ice caps, Greenland etc are melting rapidly, this is not speculation these are facts, these are things currently happening.
We know how much ice is on land, people have spent decades drilling the ice and calculating it's volume etc, we know it's melting because there's way less of it now than there was just decades ago and we know how much that melted ice will influence water levels.
We know the effect greenhouse gases have on the atmosphere and global temperatures, people have made scientifically informed charts predicting how the temperature will rise decades ago and we are right on track.
The prediction happened when I was a child, and all my life I've watched the prediction come true. The fact that there's still millions if not billions of people out there who are living through the same situation and still think climate change is a hoax is absolutely baffling to me. Just look at a fucking global average temperature chart for the past few decades holy shit man it's not a secret the planet is cooking. It's not maybe going to cook 500 years from now it's cooking right now and it's getting worse every year how can you possibly look at these simple clear facts and not understand that it's going to continue?
You guys annoy me so much holy shit open your eyes and just look at the world we live in
Greenhouse gas emissions are a huge problem, but there's no reason to believe we can't solve or mitigate the effects one way or another. It may come at a terrible cost, or it may turn out to be easier than you'd expect.
You're not using "science" to predict the future. You're just expressing a pessimistic belief that we're doomed based your own idea of how things will play out.
To me, optimism seems far more justified based on our track record, we've more-or-less solved some big problems:
- "Population growth is going to cause worldwide famine"
- "We are going to run out of oil and civilization will collapse"
- "The ozone hole is going to expose everyone to dangerous radiation"
- "Acid rain is going to destroy forests and kill lakes"
- "City air pollution is going to make major cities unlivable"
- and smallpox/polio/HIV/leaded gasoline/etc
The difference between the problems you listed and climate change is that those problems are solvable. That's why we've solved them. They're also not nearly the same scale as climate change which is apocalyptic. You just cherry picked a few things we've solved and ignored the plethora of things we haven't as if that proves anything at all. How about cancer? All the other diseases we can't cure? Most of the world still lives in extreme poverty. Lots of people starve every day. Russia is bombing Ukraine. Meanwhile everyone's bickering about data centers and ram prices.
Climate change is not solvable. There is no solution. The only thing I know of that we might be able to do is spray enormous amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere hoping to block the sunlight. This might backfire spectacularly, also might not even work. It's a hail Mary we'll probably try when things get bad enough.
That's it. That's the only idea we have that might help. Maybe there's others I don't know about, but they're not good or we would be doing them already. Carbon capture is a joke, it will never make a difference. We would need a million carbon capture plants, we can't build a million capture plants.
Even if we completely stopped emitting CO2 today we would be completely fucked, and we're not doing that we are in fact producing more CO2 every year. That will probably change eventually but it's already too late.
Obviously nobody can know for sure, maybe we will get lucky and someone will come up with a genius plan that actually works. But that's far from guaranteed, as far as we know right now it's impossible so just assuming that's going to change is extremely naive. It's a thin sliver of hope it's not what we should be expecting nor relying on.
We have no good solution, and given the scale of the problem we have almost no hope of finding one. Do you understand how much atmosphere there is? We've been burning fossil fuels as fast as we can for centuries, now we are finally seeing the result of that and it's so slow that lots of people still don't believe it's happening. It's way harder to reverse.
Also, ice. Ice is important. Ice reflects sunlight and essentially stores cold. Less ice means more heat. More heat means less ice. Do you understand how long it's taken to build the amount of ice on the planet? Absolutely no amount of terraforming will rebuild the ice we're losing and have lost, not in thousands of years.
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