My parents believe we’re in the end times and god will return any day now. They were mentally ill from the get go. They are pure evil and don’t see the evil they are.
Go figure they’re also extremely obese and mostly immobile. They are sloths and glutens. They never took care of themselves and believe bullshit snake oil salesmen over their own children’s advice.
You can’t reason with the evil that is these fundamental cultists.
This is my boomer dad whenever he complains about it being extremely hot in the summer, cold in the winter, too much rain, etc. Always responds well it won’t last too long and that’s just nature, nothing we can do about it because it has a mind of its own.
Phew, looks like the industrial revolution just saved us from falling below the safe climate zone! /s
And people think I’m crazy for starting an algae farm… There is no quick fix. “Science will figure something out”
I am part of that science, and I can barely afford to scale beyond what I consider my carbon footprint.
narcimalgae on YouTube, although the algorithm killed it (500 to 6 views on my last video)so I may move to peertube soon.
Can you give a quick elevator pitch for algae farms?
Water holds 8 times the gasous CO2 as the atmosphere it is exposed to at a given pressure(altitude). The algae, being carbon-based, pulls the carbon from the water to grow, and releases the oxygen as a biproduct. The algae biomass can then be condensed and stored, or used as a raw agriculture material. Water, sunlight, and a small amount of fertilizer all fed by an air pump.
Share a link here
I was just thinking about the poor air quality today and yesterday here in the Midwest, and then I see this. I want to be hopeful we can change this in my lifetime, but I am also not optimistic.
I am optimistic. I will get downvoted to oblivion, but I want to share what I honestly observe:
1. AI demand is driving huge investment in production of carbon-free energy at scale.
Yes, AI is sucking up all the immediate term cheap fossil-fuel energy while it can. But it needs more, so it’s driving carbon-free investment.
Immediate term with Small Modular fission Reactors (SMRs)
… and immediate term, multiple commercial fusion energy plants are being built.
2. Commercially viable carbon-free energy at scale is coming online in < 10 years
SMR is real, exists today, and just needs economies of scale … and stable regulation. AI datacenters are driving the orders now and even if MAGA cultists keep USA out a few more years, science-accepting countries will be investing in clusters of those, rather than coal plants, when they see working examples and so less risk.
The Fusion plants this decade will not be just prototypes, but plants that produce more energy as a whole than they take in, multiple times over, and ofc don’t produce nuclear waste. This is largely made possible by high temperature superconductors (which didn’t exist commercially when ITER was built) and a demo plant fully online in 2027
EDIT: ofc we should reduce excess CO2 emissions immediate term, don’t misconstrue long term optimism for polyannish denial of imemdiate term emergency
AI as it now stands gives me quite the opposite of hope. It’s only intended to enslave the working class and further transfer wealth to the top 0.01%, as is fusion.
Solarpunk gives me hope.
Well, maybe you aren’t aware of how it’s being used to design proteins to create therapies for pretty much… everything, from cancer to Crohn’s. Another 2-3 years before you see products in human trials.
Or how it’s revolutionized climate science and weather forecasting.
If all you see is the hype Grok images and SEO slop, it’s reasonable to reject the technology. But that would be deeply misguided.
I’m aware of the promises of AI, yes. LLMs are trash. Folding proteins is awesome. Nonetheless, it’s all controlled by the ultrawealthy, and that is THE problem today, which AI ain’t solving for us.
AI demand is driving huge investment in production of carbon-free energy at scale
I feel like AI companies are creating a large demand for energy no matter where it comes from, and feel like having some minor investments in potential carbon free energy is mainly a marketing ploy or something to point at if they ever get sued.
Immediate term with Small Modular fission Reactors (SMRs)
Tbh, the big problem with nuclear in america is that we don’t really have the federal power needed to actually coordinate and mandate the needed infrastructure for it. The US is so obsessed with state rights that we’re susceptible to nimby attacks and disputes at the local and State level governments.
To actually cut through the red tape, we’d have to empower federal agencies for a good reason for once, and I’m not very optimistic about our current political climate.
and immediate term, multiple commercial fusion energy plants are being built.
Yeah… I think it would be more accurate to say that fusion experimental sites are being built. Most nuclear engineers I’ve heard talk about fusion are still skeptical about fusion being viable in the next 20 years.
Fortunately for them, I flushed my kids.
And what were they supposed to do other than go out and vote in their own best interest?
In retrospect they’ll probably feel violence was justified. How many time machine scenarios will amount to ecoterrorism in the same way that we imagine we’d kill Hitler today
Considering they failed at that too not much.
You dont understand. The poor billionairs need their money nowwww!
Love this one. It’s one of the best illustrations of the “hockey stick effect” and a perfect way to explain why the excuse that “were just coming out of an ice age” is dead wrong.
No,No, not continue as normal, actively contributing to and profiting of. And engaging in generational bickering; In fact telling kids (!) Yes! kids! That… (checks notes)…they have autism (??) in response to them screaming att the old farts to do something. As if that was not enough, a guy painted his skin orange and spent his power on destroying climate research data. On actually hunting it down in Arctic stations to delete it.
The wealth that was “generated” was systematically funneled into symbols to a handful of senile males that never spent a penny, but for sometimes when they brunt a chunk of the gold on making sure every adult continues to bicker with their kids and continually actively release kilotons of carbon into the stratosphere as a “ritual”.
Because even though we had clean propulsion and energy available, the insane carousel of madness could stop if we didn’t ride the ton metal beasts every day and it’s not far then before people realize that the wealth and power is all just symbolic. All just a number in a computer on Panama. An unphantomable number, to be sure, oh it is very, very unphantomable, but as a legacy goes, the new names for big numbers we had to invent – it wasn’t even that good? A googol of gold? Is that supposed to be a joke? Is really it so funny? Is calling one of the megacorporations “googlog” like… a meme to them? Is this their “doge”? It’s so dry, but it fits… That they might just… Find it funny to say. Guess it tends to happen with made up currency.
The worldslacht though, isn’t even profitable any more in the symbolic sense. They have to pay for oil rigs, astroturfing, oil rigs, war, class war, culture war, media entertainment, fracking rigs, haulers, astroturfing, oil spills, new huge boats with a pool, art to write off tax with, and really it’s all ending in a whimper as the entire golden age we should have had was swallowed by their immense greed. Movies are about oil and cars. Wars are about cars. Some culture wants to live in a house? No, your land is now a parking. Huge spaces, just a place where we store our ton metal beasts that chug benzenes and scream at the sky to move us walking distance. They have to be placed in a painted rectangle on a flat surface and we have a most important war over who has what painted square.
If you think we respect our metal beasts then no, we crush the ton metal beasts and build new ones constantly so we can have a little war over who has the newest and hottest model. It is said that person gets to mate more often. But I truly wonder what mates were gained this way.
It is cool to have larger vehicles, but only up to a specific point, if you share your ride then it is no longer a mating ritual. If you ride too many, you are instead redicculed. “Don’t you have your own ton metal beast?” No, to really stand out with feathers cocked, you have to ride your metal beast alone. One person per beast. If you really need a mate to nest with get a really heavy or fast or flying metal beast, and use it to go alone. It signals status. Fuckability.
That you have your own several ton metal beast roaring, yes sometimes actually emptying the carbon in the sky directly when exploding the oil it apparently requires to propel tonnes of metal… for one single guy (and sometimes a mate or two). This is the dream. This is true freedom. To spend incredible amounts to move several tons of metal, just to transport one guy a little more comfortably than if they went on a rail. Did I mention, by the way, that yes we actually had already invented rails. It just didn’t make its way to America yet. It’s… (checks notes again) …too expensive.
Well they will all be dead soon, leaving only the kids with the aftermath of what seems like a party, but actually was only a mess that sincerely wasn’t worth it as the profits of all work just sit there, completely unused potential to at least do something they would want with it. I mean something fun and stupid while they have the opportunity to actually do anything with the whole world as their playground. But like a child that does not want to share, its only purpose is to point out how much better than everyone else these senile few was.
And yeah that was a feverish century everyone else seemingly worshipped and adored these elite… except the kids. And they were rediculed because they were autistic and adhd and all other institutional psychological distress, but of course never heard for their very clear “how dare you, shitheads?”. The darned kids. But the legacy of the elite that forced the world to toil for oil will truly go down in history as utter tools. It is just sad that they mauled the planet into a death spiral that seems to end our species. It was kind of a childish thing to do, ironically.
Hey man, can I get a couple Adderall?
Just like with debt, we can just raise the ceiling and the problem is fixed
“The line must go up” or something like that
The scary thing is, this graph is probably far too conservative.
Evidence is now emerging that indicates that warming has accelerated dramatically in the last 2-3 years. As in, we may see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50, with +3℃ happening just after 2035, and +4℃ happening by some time around 2040 to 2050.
You know what happens around +4℃? The extinction of all megafauna - animals larger than 45kg. Like humans. The entire ⅓ of the planet between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will experience lethally high wet bulb temperatures across all regions for at least several weeks out of every year, rendering it permanently uninhabitable for the 4+ Billion people that currently live there. India is currently flirting with that reality.
And with that heating inertia, 2100 may see +8℃ temps, which essentially means ice-free poles year round (once things calm down), with palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. Of course, by that time chaotic weather and resource exhaustion will have killed off all remaining humans.
And the lovely thing about “moving parts” is that they all have this little thing called inertia… the faster they move, the further they go. And +8℃ is very close to the +12-15℃ that a Venus Scenario would be triggered by.
Past warming events have been “similar” in that they have gotten just as warm, but they took hundreds of thousands of years to get to the same place, allowing entire continent-wide ecosystems to quite literally migrate across thousands of kilometers to adapt. Our changes are happening in less than 0.01% of that time scale, giving ecosystems no time at all in which to react. So our biosphere will get slaughtered along with us, and will be unable to compensate in time.
And with the biosphere becoming overwhelmed by rapid changes, there goes the “friction” that could do something about that “inertia”.
And the worst part is, we still haven’t moved off of the worst-case-possible “business as usual” path. We are swan-diving into the worst possible future. Thanks to billionaires addicted to fat profit margins and who control all of the processes, we are utterly failing to generate the change needed to save ourselves, with CO2e production - purely human sources, excluding the feedback loops in nature!! - CONTINUING TO ACCELERATE.
Fun times. I just might live long enough to see humanity go extinct.
Yet “you have to have a car to work” like ok no for one fuck you for two we have several modes of transport AND energy sources now you actually do choose actively to diarrhea out carbon on purpose and I fucking see you
Depends a lot on where you are from. Not everyone has the means to uproot and move to a walkable city or a city with public transport.
Our governments have fundamentally failed us
Not that renaming problems ever helps, but this is why I’m trying to push “anthropogenic runaway global heating” as a replacement for the weak formulation of “global warming” and the even weaker “climate change”. It has the handy acronym of ARGH.
It has the handy acronym of ARGH.
Okay, that is hilarious.
I’m just going to call it “the climate shitshow” at this point, with how cooked we seem to be.
Love it.
I just finished reading The Deluge by Stephen Markley and I’m at the acceptance phase of greif.
Tardigrades will probably survive, and at least plastic pollution will be halted.
Can you back up these claims? Not doubting, just curious/terrified to learn more.
Here, feel free to simultaneously urinate and defecate into your pants:
All of this is evidence-based. All of this relies on facts.
Yeah, we’re f**king hosed as a species. Our legacy at this point should be in preventing a Venus Scenario, so at least life can continue to go on in some fashion
Fucking sucks. Thanks.
So I suppose I just have 15 more years to live huh?
I would say 10 of relative comfort, another 5-10 of increasing disasters (political, social, environmental, etc.) that tear apart civilization, and a final 5-10 of complete collapse where only small isolated communities still exist, and every day is a real struggle for survival against exceptionally hostile conditions.
Honestly, most scientific projections of resource exhaustion and environmental degradation point to 2050 as the point beyond which “civilization” really ceases to exist.
And honestly, I would be shocked if humanity still existed as any kind of a high-tech going concern much past that.
Yes there are some upsides
The planet is fine it’s the people who are fucked
We don’t exactly know where the tipping point towards a Venus Scenario is. We just know it’s somewhere past +12℃, and before +16℃.
And the problem isn’t so much that we will reach that temp - we will go extinct long before that point - but rather the warming process - with all of the feedback loops that it kicks off - will push the planet into a Venus Scenario.
So no. The planet is not fine. The “friction” of prior warming events that would slow its “inertia” - the slowly-migrating, slowly-adapting biospheres that continue to draw down CO2e - won’t have that capability this time around. It’s just all happening far too fast for them to migrate or adapt.
We have literally “cut the brakes” with the speed and inertia of the current warming we have created. And one very real consequence may be a dead planet with a superheated atmosphere.
Maybe we kick off a nuclear winter before we go out
deleted by creator
AI is going to fix this by increasing the scale of the Y axis.
Just hallucinate better data
That ‘line goes up’ graph shape has been termed a ‘hockey stick’ as it’s become so prevalent in recent years.