Anyone's who's read The Ministry For The Future is uncomfortably familiar with the term 'wet bulb globe temperature'. Forget heat index, WBGT is what you'll hear mentioned a lot more moving forward.
The pre-eminent philosopher (and recently deceased) Daniel Dennett stated recently that "Large Language Models #LLM are the most dangerous technology ever developed, capable of leading to the collapse of not just #democracy but of #civilization ... This technology can flood the world with manipulative fake people ... Who controls your attention, controls you. We are in danger of losing our free will and being turned into puppets."
@ariadne The most dangerous technology is the steam engine, and it's not only "capable" of collapse of #civilization but that is the path we are currently on. People are manipulated about that fact, their attention diverted, and we actively try to avoid confronting it. All without #LLM|s or #AI. I condemn tech bros who are fascinated with future doom while ignoring what is happening right now.
When #Copernicus published its update "April 2024 was warmer globally than any previous April in the data record" I heard it in a casual radio message, followed by an update on football.
Even though I have to deal with #ClimateChange professionally, the realization that we are in an uncharted climate territory does not make it any less mind-boggling. Casually mentioning this unfolding threat to our civilization in between the really relevant news and sports borders with denialism. #DontLookUp
@TatianaIlyina In much of the coverage here in a chilly Scotland there’s a tendency to have more frequently a positive spin on “global warming” - hotter summers, milder winters. The phrase is not helpful. Or current climate and much of our current society will collapse. I wish we could settle on terminology that better captures the societal disruption. #climatecollapse
This unrelenting senseless drive for economic growth at all costs means more of everything — more cars, more roads, more shopping centers, more cheap disposable plastic products, more waste, more factories, more fossil fuels, more CO2 emissions, and more global heating.
And that means more storms, more floods, more wildfires, more smoke, more droughts, more famines, more extinctions, and many many more deaths.
It's time to stop. Turn it off.
For us to have even a small chance of avoiding setting off irreversible chain reactions far beyond human control we need drastic, immediate, far-reaching emissions cuts at the source.
When your bathtub is about to overflow, you don't go looking for buckets or start covering the floor with towels — you start by turning off the tap as soon as you possibly can. Leaving the water running means ignoring or denying the problem, delaying doing anything to resolve it, and downplaying its consequences.
On the ex-Bird Site, Martin Tye, Director of the Australian Regional Communities Chapter of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (https://steadystate.org/) posted this crisp summary:
«We live in the dying gasps of economic growth,
... where it claws at the last of our resources, our ecosystems & our quality of life to feed it's terminal days.
"The researchers estimate that the northern permafrost region emitted 38M tons of CH4 and 670,000 tons of N2O into the atmosphere between 2000 & 2020. That's very little compared with the emissions of a major industrialized country, but the pace may accelerate as the world warms."
Part of me can see how much nicer our world might be without any humans in it. Ecosystems could find their own equilibrium, unhindered by industrial pollution. Species could expand again and diversify, free of competition from the endless growth of factory farms, freeways, and parking lots.
It would take much time, centuries or even millennia, for the sky to regain its natural clarity, the forests to regrow, and the rivers to run clean. Even longer than that, probably, for all of the plastic eventually to degrade and disappear.
But someday, someday… the Earth would once again be a beautiful place.
It’s a lovely vision, and yet I’m torn. Because to get there means the suffering and death of billions of people. I wish there was a way to prevent that.
I don't personally like the "the world would look better without us" nihilism.
There would be no one to appreciate it. One of the responsibilities of humanity is to appreciate the Universe from the micro to the macro. We've done it as individuals. We need to do it as a society. All that beauty is really as much an artifact of us, not of the Universe. Without us, it is invisible. That's not to say we're forgiven for other things. But it's our role.
But even beyond that, it's not even slightly obvious that the world ecosystem will survive at all. It may be we'll lose all mammals. It might be we'll lose everything that's not extremophile bacteria. People may differ on where we are going, but I think it is an outright fantasy to say that higher life forms will survive unscathed with any certainty, or that it will be only hundreds or thousands of years. If it were that, people would survive, too, and that's not a certainty either. What we've done is going to take a LOT of stuff with it, a lot of nature's investment. We owe it to those other species to undo our inertial path to wiping out much more than us.
I'm quite worried there won't be enough time before the sun burns out to evolve anything with even a chance of taking over our role as appreciator of the Universe. Moreover, there's every likelihood that other species that could evolve will have the same bad tendencies as us. We need to solve our problem, not pass it along. We don't know they'll do any better. What we know is that WE are fully empowered with enough information and capability to do so. We need to actually use that knowledge and capability.
It might not always be meteors, but the dinosaurs are more typical of what could happen if we leave it to others. They had a world different than ours, but it survived a lot longer than we're going to have survived. But in the end, their lack of awareness of what was happening to them left them not knowing why they had died or what they could have done to stave it off. We have the rare gift of science that tells us what's going on, the rare gift of ice cores that we analyzed fast enough, before they melted, that told us this has happened before and will happen to us again. We have all kinds of very ephemeral cues that we cannot assume future ecosystems will know. We are the optimal chance to finally break the natural cycle and put the world into a harmony that is sustainable. And we are squandering that. What will happen if we relinquish that isn't that some ecosystem will do better. It's that ecosystems will helplessly come and go for many reasons that are out of their control and unaware of all the amazingness around them.
Sorry for typos and/or redundancy in the above. It's stream of consciousness quickly keyed in, but all I have time for. I hope somewhere within there's food for thought and more discussion.
Yes, getting the press and business analysts to admit and track that some part of pricing is not cyclic is key. Once people understand that a part of the market is permanently wrecked and that the wrecking ball will continue to swing, the conversation can change more easily.
A problem not described correctly is not ripe for correct/productive/relevant solutions.
Media across the political spectrum needs to be preparing the public for this in food because pretending it's partisan will not cause the public to reason well. It'll be like masks for covid, where the topic is just a tool to randomly outrage people with lies.
Let’s get personal, shall we? I’ve been here a while now, and as I’m feeling quite comfortable at Mastodon, I’d like to share a bit more about myself beyond my passion for the climate and the environment.
To begin with, I’m a male, he/him, hetero, strongly supporting LGBTQ rights. I’m a baby boomer, born at 312 PPM 🌏, a United Statesian, although I lived in Europe (mostly Hungary) for several years, and traveled extensively for work before retiring in 2012. I’ve never been good at sustaining long-term romantic relationships, and I’ve finally settled into comfortable singlehood.
I like to say I’m made of contrasts.
For example, I’m rather funny and quite personable, but I don’t enjoy small talk and I hate parties. I currently live in the Bible Belt, but I’m an outspoken atheist. While I can easily fit into most social situations, I don’t feel comfortable around large groups and prefer being alone most of the time. I live near two huge military bases, but I detest the USA’s militaristic, troop-worshiping culture. I’m almost always cheerful, which masks my deeply felt existential nihilism. I’m a neat freak, but also rather lazy, preferring fun over work.
I’ll finish up with some hashtags to add flavor...