Submitted 3 weeks ago by Daft_ish@lemmy.dbzer0.com to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Uhhhh…. they’ve been warning us for many decades, now? (and sounding alarms)
There’s also the fact that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and others) discovered key mechanisms of the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2’s key role in such, back in the 1800’s. So you know, want to know about a science issue? Maybe ask literal scientists?
It’s not the body of relevant scientists that are letting us down, Dafty…
Geologist here. It’s really depressing being in the community these days. We’re continually being defunded and we know better than most what a systemic crisis this planet’s ecosystem is in. For some reason we thought it was a good idea to put lawyers in charge of everything instead of experts.
We’re continually being defunded
Well, that’s the disaster happening in the States, but the time-stamp here suggests maybe you’re… in Western Europe? Shit, so what’s the trouble with lawyers, in this case?
Climate scientist here: what is there to reconcile? Slowing and eventually stopping warming is definitely possible, even inevitable, the question is just when and how fast we can do it, and what the repercussions are. Every fraction of a degree warmer is worse, so we should be taking as much mitigation action as fast as we can. Mitigating earlier is better than adapting later.
Sorry if you think Im throwing shade. I just dont see how mitigation is possible.
Mitigation is always possible. If we don’t do it intentionally, eventually the climate will force our hand. This will result in billions of human deaths, extinction of many organisms, and massive destruction of the current global ecology, but it will happen.
Remember, the Sahara wasn’t always a desert, and North America was more than once covered in ice.
We’re likely to die off due to poisoning the environment long before the climate makes a significant dent in our 8bn population.
We’re not going to escape sea level rise or some places becoming uninhabitable, nor a redistribution of water and total destruction of all weather models. But we can slow the changes to the point where we can adapt faster than the climate changes… and the more we mitigate, the more lives we save along the way.
Use less fossil fuels. We have the technology to have electrified public transport, for instance. We just don’t have the political will or the financial backing. This is not really a problem that scientists are well equipt to solve.
Stopping the digging up and burning of carbon fuels is a start.
It took the planet literal hundreds of thousands of years to get the carbon level of the atmosphere down to preindustrial levels, and we’ve undone that in the past near 200
It’ll take a lot, but it’s not impossible to increase carbon capture, use ground based solar to give shade and re-green some desert areas (proven to work) we can easily provide the entire earth’s power requirements while also increasing the carbon sequestration.
Just shoot all the planes
It’s been settled for 20 years that the world is warming. The efforts at this point are entirely focused on containing and limiting the damage. The fight to stop it is long over, and there’s absolutely nothing that can stop some level of catastrophic damage.
It’s actually been settled science for over 40 years at this point. Here’s Carl Sagan laying it out to Congress in 1985 youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
I mean technically the science of it has been settled for over 100 years. That’s why Alexander Graham Bell sunk his fortune into early solar energy. That we are going over the cliff into warming the likes of which haven’t been seen in 250 million years is what has been settled for at least 20.
I had to reckon with this as a civic-minded class of 2000, we got the early digital everything and they had such fanfare for bringing us up, and into the future, a gateway to a new generation - and as kids, we had media for 20 years telling us something had to change - they told us Millennials were going to solve the looming problems of the past. But then we found out the world didn’t really want those changes, and we burned out like Great Value Incandescents. Then it was several years of “how do I plan a retirement against the coming climate wars…” and then the Great Despair where I just did drugs for several years and gave up,
To be fair, I don’t think they expected that generation of the time to still be in power.
The next generations might inspire change. We can hope that change will be good, but the world hasn’t really moved from the old generations of then.
If you mean inevitable due to lack of global action, then yeah because that’s how most models present eventual societal collapse.
If you mean because its too far gone, that’s not true. There’s still time to mitigate the issues we’ve created, but the effort required increases every year, and there’s not enough being done about it.
Reconcile what exactly? Scientists give the info, if people don’t act on it … What are you expecting researchers to do about it?
Yes, constantly.
Most people, imo, don’t have a good idea who the scientific community is and what their discussions look like. The scientific community is made up primarily of working class nerds who work at universities and suppliers and contract companies, and they communicate through blog and magazine articles in publications by and for other academics.
If you go to a scientific conference, you’ll see talks and panels on this subject and it’s a routine topic at coffee breaks and drinks in the evenings.
The scientific community has been discussing this topic literally longer than anyone else.
“Scientific Community” is kind of a broad term. It is composed of a lot of smarty-pants types who are unlikely to take “no” for an answer, and will keep trying to fix the problem.
In the end, you may be right, and there’s no way to stop the runaway train, and all these folks will accomplish is getting our hopes raised while they earn their PhD’s and present papers in worldwide conferences they all burned jet fuel to get to.
But, what if you turn out to be wrong, and one of those poindexters actually figures out how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere in an economical fashion, and they manage to stop the train? That person will be instantly famous, and the Nobel Prize might be the least of their accolades. They will be remembered as one of humanity’s greatest minds. If they happen to be British, they will be buried next to Newton and Darwin, that’s how important it will be.
So, they will keep trying, because it’s as close as you can get in this life to immortality.
It’s an energy problem, not a smarts problem.
Imagine the Hiroshima bomb.
How much energy that contains.
Now understand that, just from excess emissions alone, we are adding at least four of those nuclear explosions worth of energy into the atmosphere.
Per second.
That’s right, per second.
There is no solving this without technology that would be indistinguishable from magic, so not happening. We had our chance, capitalism won, and those at the top are hoarding and preparing for what’s coming next.
Remember that we have technology that 100 years ago would have been indistinguishable from magic.
looks a solar panels
Yep, magic right there.
Sees nuclear power plants
What sorcery is this?!
Observes EVs, heat pumps, biofuels…
Mysteries beyond the comprehension of man!
They can either give up, or keep trying. Which would you do?
Is going to? It’s already happening. We’ve seen increased heat stroke deaths. We’ve seen animal populations get displaced.
The place to read that would be the latest IPCC reports www.ipcc.ch
Lmao
As others said, it’s generally a routine thing. I did once see a Mastodon post from a climate scientist, where they expressed that they’re losing hope.
If that’s the kind of reconciling you’re talking about, I imagine every climate scientist has gone through that, but it’s something they tend to deal with individually rather than stating it publicly.
The problem is that you don’t want to give the public the impression that it’s hopeless. Fossil fuel corporations will use that against you. And it just does not make rational sense.
Any amount of greenhouse gas that we don’t put into the atmosphere makes our lives easier. Even if you give up hope for some particular goal, you would still want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, so that it doesn’t become worse sooner.
Climate change already affects our lives. We really don’t want it to become worse sooner.
Yes, scientists have reconciled with this. In fact, climate change is now an outdated term; it is called climate collapse, and scientists (across many disciplines), most (rational, non-populist) politicians and citizens acknowledge that the dramatic effects are omnipresent.
We definitely still use the term climate change.
Glad semantics will survive any catastrophe 🤧
We could kill the vroemers
There are different fields of science. In my field (water resources), any scientist that is reasonable knows the climate change is happening, you can see it in any data that spans for last 50 years. We’re focused on how to deal with it, given it’ll get worse. All the future scenarios (from simulations) are worse than history, there’s less worse and more worse depending on how people will act. But I think even the worst case did not have “world war” into consideration. So we might have wayy worse than our predictions. But again, predicting future is hard, there could be effects that we’re not expecting. Specially the current geopolitical scenario when climate change (and greed) is making life hard leading into authoritative regimes which is making it worse on top of previous policies. Which exceeds the linear growth pattern used in the simulations.
But I think even the worst case did not have “world war” into consideration.
Specifically “blowing up regional methane storage” was probably unexpected.
No, scientists can definitely do something about it.
I think if you replace scientists with a body that is paralyzed with inaction because of regulatory capture like the US it would make more sense.
Has the US government ever reconciled with the fact global warming is happening and there is no way they can work together to stop it?
The answer is then a clean yes.
Well for example, I read they’re harvesting coral samples so we can try to regrow the coral reefs in the future.
They are trying, but… I was at a talk by a leading coral reef scientist last year, he said it would if it worked well, doing enough of it to maintain the Great Barrier Reef would cost on the order of ten trillion dollars a year…
Oh no. I held onto that as some semblance of good news for the corals😭
And lose my funding?
Global warming was a fraud created from geoengineers. This was the reason why they were shifting blame of their weather modification onto the people.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes they have already reconciled that it is already happening now. They are figuring out how to stop it so that all life on Earth doesn’t go extinct…
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
But then Nestle says “Life? Or profits today?..PROFITS!!! FUCK YO’ WATER SUPPLY!!! I DO WHAT I WANT!!!”
ripcord@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There are virtually no scientists that think all life on earth will go extinct.
notsosure@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
That ALL life will go extinct is hard to imagine, but many scientists do see a high chance that humanity is going extinct (due to climate collapse) or, at the very least a population collapse of >95% is certain to happen within 200 years.