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• queermunist@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Lake Erie was dead from pollution. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted it caught fire.

  I misunderstood the examples given, I figured they were filled with trash, looking it up I see trash was only part of the problem.

  But that doesn’t actually change my point! Cleaning up toxic waste at a single lake or river site isn’t the same as cleaning the atmosphere of the entire fucking planet. It’s absurd to put these on the same scale as climate change.

  We don’t even have the technology to clean the atmosphere on a human timescale, and it might not even be possible.

  I already mentioned CFC’s which required global cooperation on a scale never seen before.

  CFCs were only emitted from a few specific industries and could be eliminated easily with alternatives, and they weren’t the basis for the entire economy. CFCs are also not present in the atmosphere for very long and they decay very quickly, and were only present at a little over 1 part per billion. They’re already falling because eliminating them was easy.

  We’re at 415 parts per million in CO2 concentrations. That’s orders of magnitude in difference, and the carbon that is already present will take multiple human lifetimes to be removed via natural means.

  CFCs were baby shit compared to this crisis of civilization.

  Everything is bigger than anying human history because we have more people.

  That also means we have more enemies, and at the moment those enemies are controlling the US government.

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  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Cleaning up toxic waste at a single lake or river site

    It wasn’t a single river and single lake. It was everywhere. There wasn’t a clean river, large lake or bay in the US. The examples I gave were only the most publicized.

    The air in all cities, everywhere, was so polluted the moths evolved to be black.

    ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/…/signs-recovering-harbor…!

    …jhu.edu/…/baltimores-swimmable-harbor-movement#%….

    californiasun.co/photos-when-l-a-smog-was-so-bad-…

    We’re at 415 parts per million in CO2 concentrations. That’s orders of magnitude in difference, and the carbon that is already present will take multiple human lifetimes to be removed via natural means.

    Unchecked CFC’s would have resulted in the sterilization of the entire planet. In the 1970’s pollution was at a level where all life was destroyed in many local ecologies. It wasn’t “It’s too hot here so native species died out and were replaced with desert species.” It was complete annihilation of all life in the area.

    Global warming means a few billion die. It’s an extremely serious problem but we are improving.

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    rhg.com/…/preliminary-us-greenhouse-gas-estimates…

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