It’s always good to be sure and double-check periodically but it sure is tiring that we’re still kind of in the proof phase and not fully in the do something phase.
With COVID you develop symptoms and realize that you and the people you met almost a week after you got the disease and started to spread it to others.
With this is the same, but with years and decades, by the time you notice visible enough symptoms it may be too late to stop all that is coming in the delivery train, but you can still have some margin to mitigate some of the damage.
It’s not a system with so direct action and immediate reaction, things build up, accumulate, trigger feedback loops, and that in a scale that we won’t be able to stop by delaying action.
You know, there is a significant amount of people that don't want to sacrifice anything of their comfort or profits, that expected to die of old age before this happened.
But nature doesn't wait for petty plans to complete.
In the US there are still people who don't believe COVID 19 existed or that it took out over a million people. Or that the US population is <400 million people and that semi trucks filled with dead Americans across the country was ever a problem.
Propaganda makes it much much easier for bad faith industrial actors to sabotage an entire country, or I suppose even the world. Pump and dumping civilization has got to be an extraterrestrial meme or something...
If scientists observed people shovelling dirt into a large hole, and predicted that over time the hole would fill should people keep shovelling dirt into it, we wouldn't be seeing the same kinds of mental gymnastics as we do when scientists predict that pumping greenhouse gasses into to the sky causes things to get warmer.
It's hard to ask workers to stop flying during their discounted vacations when executives are flying to "meet people", monthly reviews or even single meetings.
I think, it is rather people not wanting to sacrifice their profits who convince others that their comfort is at stake, that block every meaningful move at at least mitigating climate change...
This right here is the real truth of the matter. We didn't have to give up a ton of comfort (if we'd taken this seriously enough decades ago when we should have), although now that we've put it off as long as we have, we're all gonna give up a ton of comforts before it's over, and there's no avoiding it now. This is the result of us allowing our "leaders" (and their corporate owners) to run rampant doing as they please for far too long, and it's now likely much too late to avoid the worst possible outcome. I have zero faith that humanity will try to "go out with some dignity".
Absolutely so. What are they supposed to be sacrificing their comfort and profit to achieve?
Article says 61,000 people in Europe died in the 2022 heatwaves. Something like 60,000,000 people die annually (I'd guess about 6 million in Europe) [0]. How much comfort and profit were we meant to sacrifice to prevent that rounding error? Air pollution from coal plants that could directly kill people is a better argument for phasing them out than these heat waves.
With this is the same, but with years and decades, by the time you notice visible enough symptoms it may be too late to stop all that is coming in the delivery train, but you can still have some margin to mitigate some of the damage.
It’s not a system with so direct action and immediate reaction, things build up, accumulate, trigger feedback loops, and that in a scale that we won’t be able to stop by delaying action.